Thursday, 2/8

Hopefully, three months from today will be better than it is today.

Three months from today Loraine and I are hoping to head to Germany, where we hope to spend ten days flying into Frankfurt, taking a train to Kaiserslauten, another train to Freiburg, and then a train back to Frankfurt to fly back home again. I say “hope” because, as I write this, both airport security & ground crew workers, as well as train drivers are on strike in Germany, along with the people who run the tram systems in each city.

And there doesn't seem to be an end in sight.

It's been like this for a while now; people in one of the fields will strike for a day or two and go back to work, followed the next few days by another group hitting the picket lines. As with all workers, they're looking for better pay and better conditions, and they do have the support of a majority of the German people. But then Europeans take the quality of their work life a lot of seriously than the rest of the world, so the support they're receiving doesn't surprise me, nor do the strikes.

I just hope they're over in three months.

At one time Loraine & I were thinking of renting a car while we're over there, as we usually do. But when we discovered that the car rental would be almost as much as a plane ticket over there, that changed. Besides, the two places where we hope to go are very-pedestrian and public transportation friendly, at least when the public transportation workers aren't on strike, so we figured not having a car wouldn't be that big of a deal.

We'll see how that turns out.

This will be the first non-soccer trip we've taken over there since 2018, and our first jaunt at all since the fall of '22. We're hoping it works out, if only because I love Freiburg and Loraine really wants to see Kaiserslauten. And while we realize there are some things out of our control, it really WOULD be nice if they called off their strikes for just a short period.

You know...like May 8^th through the 19th?

8-)

Here's one of the places we're heading, Freiburg. I can't wait to see it again. And hopefully, I'll have the chance.

(jim@wmqt.com)