Zpet

After a miserable night’s sleep of waking up every hour or two, and feeling cold often, I was awake and ready to go before 9am. My wife took me back to Landrum, at the intersection of I26 and Hwy 14, about where I would have reached yesterday, if I hadn’t gone in the wrong direction. Today I wasn’t carrying my backpack, just my fanny back with two bottles, so the 20 plus miles to Lake Lure shouldn’t be too bad. I turned onto Red Fox Road, walked a mile or so and realized I should have used the restroom back at the gas station where my wife dropped me off! I knew there wasn’t any gas stations or stores for quite a few miles, but when I spotted a church, and realized it was Sunday, I ... read more

4-Day Trial Walk: Day 1: I left the house a bit later than I’d wanted to… about 9:30am. After parking my car in the Hertz garage at Greenville Spartanburg Airport (GSP), I rode back home with my wife, get my stuff together and started walking around 11am. After walking through our lovely neighborhood, I continue down Neely Farm Road, past W. Georgia Road, until I decided to take a break at the SpinX gas station on E. Standing Springs Road around 12:30pm, where I took my shoes off while I enjoyed a Cheerwine Icee or Slurpee. Can you say brain freeze? LOL Along the way I met a little friend on the side of the road, see the photo. Fortunately although the snake had its head reared up and mouth open, it was quite dead. My ... read more

We were awake by 6am and ready to go. Sean had to leave for work by 7am and Alina was going with us to try again to get out of Ramstein. When we arrived, we saw our old C5 flight, plus the one that had been rescheduled 4 or 5 days, and a C17 to McGuire through Canada. The McGuire flight only showed 14 seats, tentative, so we weren't holding our breaths. As the morning went by, the rescheduled both the C5 flights and the C17 still showed 14 seats, so a number of folks left for greener pastures, including most of the folks that had been ticketed for our cancelled C5 from yesterday. The three of us, Alina, my wife, and I, decided to stick it out and see if we might possibly make the ... read more

Today, hopefully our last full day in Germany, Manoli remembered the statues of soccer players (football or fusbol in Europe) that we'd seen a couple times on our way to the base, so we headed in what we hoped was the right direction. Along the way, we passed a General Dynamics European Land Systems compound. I'd worked for General Dynamics 22 years before retiring last year. I knew they had offices around the world, but was still surprised to find one here. Since it was a different division than mine, Information Systems, I just sort of gawked, took a photo, and continued on. We found the first set of statues called Fussball ohne Grenzen, which means Football without Borders. It is a sort of reenactment of a soccer game with players from all around the world ... read more

This morning, after a better than usual night's sleep, we got up later than normal and headed to the base at Ramstein to check things out. We wanted up-to-date info on upcoming flights home, how to turn in our rental car, and see if we could browse the base exchange. We'd found out on their webpage that there were two flights to the states on Sunday. At the moment, there is a flight to Andrews AFB in Maryland and one to Dover AFB in Delaware. Neither is ideal, but with no better alternatives in the current future, we will probably go for either one of those tomorrow. We also found out that although Hertz isn't open on Sunday, we can park our rental car in a lot near the terminal and just drop our keys in ... read more