Day 21 (Tuesday) Frankfurt / visiting the Dolans

---

Hello again from Germany. Janet says that she does not have a cold but is just suffering from allergies (probably triggered by the variety of pollens during yesterday’s flower show). Regardless, she is not feeling too well today, so we are taking a day off from touring and just having a final day to visit with the family. There are lots of places that we could go see, but we will just have to save some sights for another time.

Yesterday, Maggie and Jessica got to skip school to come with us to Koblenz, but today they had to go back to school. But we did get to visit with them after they returned from school.

Sue took David out to the AF base Laundromat this morning and now we have a full set of clean clothes to finish our trip. We still had quite a few clean outfits, but they were all long sleeved and we have been having warm weather lately. In fact we had bright sunny days both yesterday and today with hardly a cloud in the sky – it did get a little breezy this afternoon. Since we could not count on it getting cold, we needed to clean the short-sleeve outfits one more time. But that is all done now. I doubt if we will want to wear these particular outfits for a long time after we get back home. But the bags are now packed again and we will be off for France tomorrow morning.

This afternoon David and Mike worked on a repair project to fix the awning that should be able to be lowered above the front window. We needed to replace a specialized bolt which had broken some time ago. A quick trip to the local hardware store produced no help from the salesperson, who only spoke German, but we were able to jury-rig a replacement part and now the awning opens and closes like it is supposed to. There is a second awning which should cover the sun room, but it has a more severe problem and we did not have any success trying to fix it.

This evening we had dinner in an Italian restaurant in a small village a few kilometers from the Dolan’s estate. It was unusual because the proprietor only spoke Italian. The menu was in Italian but we each chose something that was really delicious. Another couple (friends of Mike & Sue) joined us – they speak Italian and English so we had a backup position if anything got really confusing. But it was a lot of fun.

We are going to make an early evening of it and get as much rest as possible before tomorrow. Good night.

---