4th of July, Dresden/Southern style

Hi Everyone!!

Thanks so much for your awesome comments. Jonathan REALLY enjoyed reading them, and they made both of us laugh. Andreas and I are having such a great time with Jonathan. He is such a sweet spirited, good natured, funny kid. Jonathan and Andreas have developed several inside jokes for which I'm either too dense or not cool enough to understand (Jonathan just assured me that it's a little bit of both... thanks, kid.) some of the jokes, but one of them will say a few words, and the other will scream with laughter, with tears flowing down their cheeks.

Sorry that we haven't written in a while. We're post-dating some of the entries so that you know what we did on which days. I was under the weather from Friday through Tuesday, so we had to take things a little slower than we had originally anticipated, but we still managed to get into plenty of mischief.

I took Jonathan to the Transparent Factory (die Gläserne Manufaktur), a VW factory made entirely of glass, which just so happens to be the only place on Earth where the VW Phaeton, VW's top of the line model is made. We took a tour, and got to see the process in full swing. The tour was really interesting, but the coolest part by far, was being able to sit in a fully completed Phaeton, and play around with the features. I won't spoil the surprises, so I will let Jonathan tell you all about it.

We had a very special 4th of July here in Dresden. Kira arrived around lunchtime, and the volume went up 10 decibels... :) We came home, I finished preparing the food for the picnic in the park, got some Michael Jackson tunes together (my friend, Carmen, Kira, and I were planning to dance like fools in the park), had everything prepared and nearly all packed away... and then the skies opened up. We had a lightning show that would have shamed any fireworks festival in the States, and it went on for hours. So we scrapped going to the park, had everyone come over to ours, and we had a picnic in the living room. Jonathan and Mister gave me a hard time at first for some of the food that I had prepared (Who has appetizers at a picnic?), but they ended up killing off nearly all of them. Apart from the appetizers, I prepared a southern themed meal in honor of Atlanta. It somehow made me feel like we were closer to home than we really are. I made pulled bbq pork sandwiches, potato salad, fruit salad, and red velvet cupcakes for dessert. MMmmmmm....

So says the Boy: Erica and I went to the transparent factory. It was really cool. It is the only place in the world that makes the VW Pheaton. The Pheaton is the top of the line car for VW. We took a tour of how it is made. The place only has three robots in the assembly line. In the Pheaton you can have it customly made, like they have three types of engines for it, the V6, the V8, and the W12. It has a seat massage in the drivers seat and the passengers seat. There is a sort of radar type of device under the hood that when your in cruise control it sences the car in front of you and keeps the same distance away from it. It also warns you when someone is coming into your lane and slows you down. On the trunk there isn't a latch to pull the trunk, you press the VW symbol and it pops up, also there is a button that you press and the trunk closes by itself.

On the 4th of July we were going to have a picnic, but it rained like it was nobodys buisness. We had pulled pork sandwiches, potato salad, fruit salad, and red velvet cupcakes. The food was realy good. I loved the red velvet cupcakes. They were amazing.

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