Dachau revisited

I’ve been to Dachau twice now—the first time was in the early 80s during my first marriage, and of course yesterday’s trip.

The first trip was strange not only because of where we were (let’s face it, Dachau is somber and thought-provoking), but also because it was about a week after my older son had fallen from a window, landed on the sidewalk below and fractured his skull, plus I’d found out the day after Jordan fell that I was pregnant with Ben and to top it all off, my then mother-in-law had just arrived to visit us for three weeks. Whew, that was a lot going on. I recall that the weather was incredibly hot for Germany, in the mid to upper 80s, possibly even 90. There were no guided tours then and the gate was in a different spot than today. The museum had what I guess was a visiting exhibition of shoes because it wasn't there yesterday—an impossibly huge pile of shoes from victims (I think they were specific to Dachau but maybe not). The shoes got me, seeing all those shoes humanized the genocide there in a way that is sometimes missed by blurry, black and white photos.

This second trip was no less moving. This time we did have a tour guide and she really filled in all the blanks. The weather was not great—temps were in the mid-60s and it rained pretty hard, hard enough to soak my not very water resistant coat so that in the end I donated some money to get a plastic rain poncho. But it was appropriate to have not great weather there. At the end of the day, I’d be getting on a bus, then a train and heading to the Hofbräuhaus for some beer and a late lunch with just wet clothing to bother me.

If you have a chance to go to one of the concentration camps, or to the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C., go. We should never forget what happened.

Snippets from Munich

As I remembered from living in Germany in the early 1980s, there’s just no trash here. None. I didn’t ride the subway then (our town had buses and trains, too small for a subway) but there’s no trash in there either and no graffiti.

Trains still run absolutely on time.

We saw several groups with leaflets but instead of shoving them into people’s hands, they stood politely holding them in their own hands, extended so you could take one if you wanted to.

We were on a walking tour about food yesterday afternoon, standing quietly in a small group with our guide when an older lady—in her 60s? perhaps 70s?—began lecturing him. My German is quite rusty any more but I had no problem understanding her diatribe. She never yelled but boy was she vicious. She had a lot to say about Americans, Obama and African-Americans.

Today we’ll go to Dachau. We hope to see a couple of museums this afternoon but it’s also supposed to storm here. We’re hoping it’s not heavy rain.

Vacations and us

Kent and I take two kinds of vacations: completely unplugged vacations where we imitate slugs doing nothing, and Crazy Trips™ where we more closely resemble Tasmanian devils on speed and just go, go, go doing and seeing things the entire time. All our trips last year fell in the Crazy Trip™ category, including Barcelona.

Last week was the unplugged kind. We would have liked to go back to Couples Negril in Jamaica but the travel time is longer and Kent doesn’t get much in the way of vacations. We wanted warm temperatures, a good beach, plenty of sunshine and easy to get to. Cancun fit the bill. Kent found a good price on flights and also found a great deal at one of the two Westin properties there – a reasonable room rate plus for another $60 a day, all our food and drinks were covered. We were pretty sure we’d have spent more than $60 a day for our food so that was an easy decision.

Overall the trip did exactly what we wanted: we both relaxed, enjoyed the temps (upper 70s and low 80s), kept our window open at night to hear the waves and ate ceviche every day. (We are now determined to make our own ceviche so stay tuned for how that goes.)

But we did still miss Jamaica. Here’s a quick comparison of the two properties:

Click to read

So the TLDR version is we prefer Negril when we have the time and money, and Cancun when either is a little tight.

Obligatory beach photo from Cancun

I'm so tired

I’ve written before that my friends and co-workers think Kent and I are insane for our four day Crazy Trips™. These are the trips we take to another country or away from North America. Generally we leave on a Friday, land on Saturday morning and go like gangbusters until Sunday evening, when we fly home again. The Crazy Trips™ have to meet some criteria in order to work for us: Delta has to fly there, and we need to be able to get there with just one plane change (not always so easy when you live in the middle of the country). To date, we’ve gone to Rome, London, Montreal and Honolulu using this method.

Last week, though, we flew to Barcelona for a more extended stay. Getting to Barcelona from Kansas City requires two plane changes (which ups the odds of encountering travel delays) and obviously takes more travel time in general. But we knew we wanted to have a special trip for our anniversary so we considered the time well spent.

But oh my golly. I am so extremely exhausted and it’s not from jet lag. I adjust really fast to the time zones. No, I am flat out beat from traveling 24 hours there and 24 hours back again and just not getting enough sleep. As much fun as we had (and we really did have a great time) and as many interesting things as we saw, it’s still been exhausting.

Truly I find the Crazy Trips™ far less tiring. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go blow my husband’s mind and take a nap.

Dublin

What fun – and in an unusual twist for us, we had absolutely amazing weather. In fact, Dublin experienced a tiny heat wave while we were there. It was so sunny that even I got a bit of sunburn. I never expected to get sunburned in Ireland.

So here’s my travelogue run down:

Friday:

• Hop On/Hop Off (HOHO) bus passes: cheaper if you buy in advance and we had, and the passes are good for two days. You get narration about the sites you pass, either by the bus driver or by tape (we far preferred the bus driver narration) . 
• James Joyce’s house: Walked there and didn’t feel at all interested in going inside. 
• The Writers Museum: Well worth seeing and it covered James Joyce too. It’s in one of the Jamison’s former houses (I forget which one and the museum website doesn’t say) and although I majored in English as an undergraduate, I had either forgotten or never realized how many famous authors came from Ireland. In the first room, there’s a description that says something about the country being very small and not heavily populated yet it’s over-represented with such important, influential authors.
• O’Neil’s Bar: We had lunch there, just sandwiches and potato salad, which was probably the best potato salad I've ever had in my life. 
• Killmainham Gaol: If you ever go to Dublin, make this site a priority. We learned so much about the Irish struggle for independence and also a lot about ordinary living during the 18th and 19th centuries. It’s well worth the time and money. 

Water in our room;
the name amused me

Beautiful stairway at The Writers Museum

Happy Kent at lunch

Saturday:

• Jamison Distillery tour (I'd link it but it will make you enter your birthday to show you're of age; you can Google it if you're interested in more information): We opted not to tour Guinness but figured we should at least do this one. Although no distillery operates there any more, they do a good job with the exhibits and information about how the distilling takes place. Bonus for me, I got selected to be one of the “tasters” at the end (the only woman I might add), which was a lot of fun.
• The Bank: We didn’t have much time to grab lunch so we took the recommendation from our hotel and stopped here. The building is beautiful inside, which you can see on the website. As a side bonus, our bartender learned from us that what the Irish call rocket is what we call arugula. He was glad to know that because he said he gets asked all the time. 
• Historic Walking Tour of Dublin: Oh my goodness, this was amazing. The tour filled in any gaps over what we’d learned at Killmainham. Our tour guide, Donal, is a PhD student at National University of Ireland (1930s Dublin, I asked) and was clearly passionate about the history and about sharing it. Our tour lasted half an hour longer than the website said it would and no one grumbled. 
• Temple Bar: Well to be honest, we avoided Temple Bar on the advice of our first cabbie and the historical tour guide – except Donal did say on the one end of Temple Bar, we could find bars that weren’t tourist traps. So we had dinner at Porterhouse and I don’t think we saw any American tourists. 

Only woman and only American!

Loin of Bacon (Kent's dinner)

We ran out of time and weren’t able to see The Book of Kells (although we saw two reproductions, one at The Writers Museum and one at The Bank where we had lunch) and we couldn’t really tour all of Trinity as we’d hoped to. But we saw a lot and had a really wonderful time.

Kiss me, I'm Irish

OK, I'm not Irish. But I am going to Ireland tonight.

Kent and I are heading out for another one of our Crazy Trips™. We're going to Dublin for the weekend. Got a packed couple of days with all the sights we want to see but the best part is I get Kent all to myself for the next four days.

If you're curious how we pick our Crazy Trip™ destinations, we need to be able to get there with only one plane change. That's about the only criteria.