This is what happens when Marshall gets asked to clear the snow off the driveway…. Hey, the snow has to go somewhere!

When Marshall and I arrived in Cashmere we got to meet the new little addition, our nephew Spencer Donald Reynolds. Emily and Darren came over and along with Marshall’s family and mine, we had a barbecue and all got to hold the super cute little guy.

All of our bags are packed and our checked baggage is actually safely packed into Wolfgang’s car, ready for the early morning trip. We spent a couple hours upstairs with Wolfgang and Annette, saying our goodbyes and talking about the year and all of our travels within that time.

Tomorrow we will get up very early and be on our way towards Switzerland in Wolfgang’s car, leaving no later than 5:30am. We will fly out of Zurich, to Toronto and then on to Seattle where we will finally land back in the US around 8:00pm. Needless to say, we will be tired after 24 hours of traveling but happy to home. We can’t wait to see you all and yes, we will definitely make sure to take our jet lag pills! See you all soon!

So tonight I am busy preparing my chocolate chip cookie dough that I will back in the office oven tomorrow so everyone can have authentic out-of-the-oven homemade American-style chocolate chip cookies. Made by a real American :-) So basically I’m not going to be doing much working tomorrow! And then at 4 I’ll leave work with some people to go check out the extensive World War II tunnels at the other end of town that open up only once a year and lucky me, tomorrow is that one time!

…days left

This morning we met up with an American co-worker of mine, Laura, and grabbed a train at about 10:30 for a little over an hour to Lindau, the last German city on the lake before entering Austria. From there we met Jessica, one of the coolest people in Germany (although she’s actually British) where she was going to pick us up and take us a 30 minute drive to her house in Lindenberg for a Thanksgiving day of sledding and turkey eating. We grabbed some light food at the train station cafe and since the city’s Christmas market was opening up for its first day, we decided to browse the market for a bit before we left. Since Christmas is a pretty big deal here in Germany and all cities have Christmas markets, it is cool to be able to see them and begin immersing ourselves into the holidays.

After enjoying some fire roasted sugar covered almonds and doing a little bit of shopping, we headed to Jessica’s place. But on the way, we had to make a much needed stop at her boyfriend Achim’s Mom’s house to pick up the sleds. And we also had a look at the brown cows in the barn all tied up for milking. They seemed very excited to have visitors and really wanted to lick us. We had a look at the babies too. They were pretty funny because they were looking for anything to suck on. If you stuck your hand out they would suck on it.

With the sleds in the car, we were on our way. We got to Jessica’s and set about preparing the food while her boyfriend Achim was leaving his work to head to the store. Jessica set about preparing the pumpkin pie (made from real pumpkin) while I prepared the orange and raspberry Jello mixture. The Jello was especially cool because Germany doesn’t have it anywhere, so luckily it came in my “thanksgiving in a box” package.

With the pumpkin pie done, the jello in the fridge with the country company potatoes I had put together the night before and Laura’s greens, it was time to get the turkey in the oven. Jessica had ordered a super good turkey in advance and before we arrived, she had stuffed it and gotten it all prepared for the oven. So in the oven it went and off we were to go sledding! That is, after much discussion of whether it was ok or not to leave the turkey in the oven by itself and wondering if we could see the window from the sledding hill should smoke start billowing out from the kitchen.

They have a great sledding hill just a few minutes walk from their apartment. It had been well-sledded and therefore was compacted to perfection. We had a great time sledding and the hill also had a bunch of kids with plastic sleds that were pretty entertaining to watch. The hill was pretty high, with a good slope and our sleds were fast so we had a pretty good time.

After a good hour or so of sledding and then a nice walk around a beautiful frozen pond that we actually walked a portion ON the pond, we made it back to the apartment to finish up the cooking. The turkey turned out absolutely perfect and tasted great and my country company potatoes were huge hit and the massive amount that I thought for sure would be too much, disappeared in no time. It was a great day followed by a fabulous meal that, while didn’t have the same food or the same feeling as being surrounded by family, it was still really nice to be able to share the holiday with friends in the area and share family food.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone, I hope you all enjoyed a great day with good food!

We hope you are all enjoying a wonderful Thanksgiving Day and have yummy smells of turkey and other such wonderful food filling your house. We enjoyed a nice meal with little turkey, stuffing and gravy meals with such sides and cheesy and buttery mashed potatoes, candied yams, cranberry sauce, olives, corn and hot spiced cider. Thanks Mom! We’ve been looking forward to eating all this yummy food all week!

We have also been invited for a turkey dinner tomorrow night out at our friends Jessica and Achim’s place down near the Austrian border. Jessica is a British landscape architect and Achim is a German architect and they are both probably the coolest people we’ve met here so it will be nice to have a holiday meal with them. Apparently Jessica lived in the states for awhile and her brother still lives there and is married to an American and has two kids so she has kind of adopted the holiday. It is pretty difficult to find a full turkey around here but she was able to order what she assures is like the best turkey ever. She is also planning to make a pumpkin pie which is a big deal since canned pumpkin does not exist here.

I actually just finished making a batch of country company potatoes and Marshall helped grate the potatoes…

which will be our contribution as well as the jello which we will have to make at her place because we were lucky to get the potatoes in our tiny little fridge as it was. But we have the orange and raspberry jello to do it! Thanks again Mom for sending all that stuff!! Also, out at Jessica and Achim’s place they have some snow and sleds and so we are going to go sledding during the day while the turkey is cooking. We are looking forward to it.

Right now we are feeling very festive. The house smells like holiday food and we’ve been playing holiday music all night from our Charlie Brown Christmas CD and The Nutcracker. Ah yes, only 10 more days…

Only 10 days left till we hop on a plane headed for Seattle!