Big extra's here in Germany

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Now as always when you travel across the world you want to find all those nice to have and nice to do activities. Here on our journey here we spent just a few hours and found some mighty wonderful things.

We found great boot washing stations outside most of the buildings. This way we will never track mud into the house. This is a real bonus because then we won’t ever have to sweep or vacuum!

We realized that Germany is really big into recycling. This should be quite a change for most of the soldiers that will be traveling with us. All trash big and small will be separated by color, type, paper or plastic and many other choices. The best part will be, if we don’t get it correct the first time they will allow us to go dumpster diving and correct our mistakes before the refuge goes off to the landfills. We have heard of many a military unit that have had big teambuilding parties all in the name of recycling.

We found a few AT&T phone banks around the area. Some look like they work and some don’t have hand sets. Hmmm…This could save us some money in the long run. But I am betting that the phone company will come and fix these before hundreds of soldiers show up for training.

The laundry mat is pretty nice. Forty washers and twenty dryers. Well more like, 33 washers and 17 dryers. The best part is that when you put your quarters in you always get your money back. You can even buy laundry soap in one of the machines. That’s looking out for the welfare of soldiers.

You can always buy a cell phone over here. Now this may be better for the younger soldiers. For me it was like setting the timer on the VCR. Hopeless. In fact, it took two days for the four of us to finally get them registered so that we could dial out. Problem was, everything is written in German. Then you call the help line and guess what? She speaks german. So over and over you just start pressing keys until you hit the lucky one that gives a happy tone and dang if it doesn’t just magically begin to work. Of course, now we don’t know how to call back to the United States. Be patient, we will figure it out before the week is up.

So far we have made it quite nicely. The pace will pick up considerably for the next week. Must find vehicles, figure out where to eat, bring in over 100 porta potties, get hundreds of computers on line and still maintain our sanity. Hope this finds everyone well back in the states well and enjoying the fall colors of the changing trees.

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