sometimes my life sounds so very romantic (strictly speaking in terms of the Anne of Green Gables definition of that word). 

yesterday we packed sleeping bags, sweatshirts, and food, and drove off to a distant town on the Bodensee.  if only i had known that the small “walk” to get to our final destination would be enough to have me almost sit down on the side of the hill, burst into tears, and tell the man who brought us, “i can’t go anymore!”  but then again, yesterday just wasn’t my day and my dizzy head and my upset tummy and my miserable emotions were enough to have me do that even if i wasn’t walking up a muddy steep incline with shoes that don’t have any traction on them, slipping and sliding and losing my balance as i went.  he eventually noticed the horrid state i was in and we slowly “zig-zagged” our way up instead of walking straight up the side of the mountain with thorns and nettles on every side and we did eventually make it to the top.  and really, it wasn’t that bad.  twenty minutes of steep incline shouldn’t have me ready to snap, but as i said, yesterday just wasn’t my day. 

what we did and where we went were worth all twenty minutes of that dreadful experience and i’d repeat them if i could ever do what we did last night again.  after making it to the top of the hill we found ourselves in the midst of monastery ruins where in the middle of this old, what used to be fabulous building, we set up camp.  we scrounged up roasting sticks which we put our wurst (sausage) on and roasted them over the fire and then later we pulled out our sleeping bags and fell asleep gazing at the stars and full moon above us.

only in Europe does something like that happen.  my “European experience” just wouldn’t have been the same if i hadn’t slept outside surrounded by old monastery walls, finding constellations above me and wondering how many other people had slept there long long ago and what their lives had been like.