It doesn't seen possible, but tomorrow morning we get on a plane to fly home. When we first arrived time seemed to go by slowly and we were savoring every moment and it seemed like we had lots of days ahead of us. And then things started to speed up and this last week time has flown. I think we all have mixed feelings. We all want to get home and see our families, sleep in our own beds, and be surrounded by our comfortable places and people. At the same time, we are a bit reluctant to have this incredible adventure come to an end. I don't think we will be able to fully process it until we have been home for a while. Our warmest thanks go out to all of the wonderful, kind, enjoyable, interesting, and special people we have met in Northern Germany. Today we did our final presentation, sang Roslein for the last time, met many of our friends from the Rotary Clubs we have visited, and said good-by. Wolfgang Janus gave a wonderful small speech about our visit and said he hoped we were taking back with us a good impression of Northern Germany. I don't know how it could be better. After the meeting I went out with Wolgang, Torbin, Claus, and Bernd and Christine for a beer at the Pavilion. So nice to sit and chat with them. Tonight I spend my last evening with my Hamburg hosts Arndt and Christina. I am picked up tomorrow morning at 7:15 for the short drive to the Hamburg airport and we will be on our way. I leave you with tow views from atop the Elbphilharmonie, the new Hamburg concert hall still under construction. What a gorgeous building.

Goodbye Sylt.

Hello Hamburg. Our arrival at the Hamburg railroad station was so chaotic that I didn't get any pictures.  But here are my wonderful host family the von Oertzens Arndt, his wife Christiana, and their daughter Maria.

Yesterday Arndt and I had a walk along a lake where we talked about music, golf, history, politics, families, etc, etc. We had a lovely dinner with some visiting friends from Argentina. This morning Arndt and I got in a jog before breakfast. We then did some city touring with the Argentines. Here is a view from the top of the St. Michel's church of the new and controversial (unfinished and way over budget) concert hall, the Elbphilharmonie. We will be visiting it tomorrow.

The we went on a tour by ship of Hamburg Harbor. Fascinating. The second largest harbor in Europe. Here are shots of the QE2 and a container ship over 320 meters long. I think I took more pictures in this one hour than I have at any other single stop.

Tonight it is German soccer. Yea!

Family time with our host families

Today was "family" time in Hamburg. Myles and mine host families went together on a boat ride on the Alster lake with paddling boats and had a picnic lunch at the Stadt Park. Here some pictures of our adventure! It was a blast!!

Our last stop...Hamburg

It's our last stop and we have arrived in Hamburg. I had a sick day yesterday. Too much wine and not enought to eat. I did have some delicious oysters though but I think I had too many. So I have taken around 1300 pictures and lots of video and I can't wait to share them when I get home. I can't believe we are leaving on Thursday. The host families have been so kind and have welcomed us with open arms all the way through. My deepest gratitude to the families and friends we have made along the way for sharing their lives, culture and time with us. It will be sad to leave but I am looking forward to seeing my friends and family and eating a tasty hamburger!

Today is a free day with our host families. My host father Christian is going to take me for a walk along the Elbe River and tonight we will have an easy evening and have dinner together with the family and maybe watch the Eurocup.

Sylt is incredibly beautiful - it is like some kind of cross between Cape Cod, Maine, and Scotland. It contains the most expensive real estate in Germany, and that is a blessing and a curse. It brings lots of wealthy people and tourists to the island where they spend money, but it also increases prices and the cost of living for everyone. We are told that some very wealthy Germans buy a house here, live in it only one month in the year, and don't rent it out. So for most of the year no one is living there. The locals talk about "dark"villages where there are no lights all winter. Last night our presentation went very well at the Sylt RC. Yesterday we got a tour of the whole island. Here is the team at the northern-most point of Germany.

During our tour we saw "Willie" the (female) seal

and a beautiful lighthouse.

Today the team had a half vocational day and I was lucky enough to get to take a long bike ride using my host Ralf's bike. This is where I rode.

Finally, this is what the sky looks like at 11:15 pm.

Moin, Moin.
Arrived yesterday on the island of Sylt by train. As always we hate to say good-by to our previous hosts but then it is always so much fun to meet the next ones. We got a great welcome at the train station.

Sylt is very beautiful and definitely reminds me of Maine. (Rather chilly today.)

Yup, step into the North Sea and it isn't bad at first, then your feet start to ache.

Last night our hosts took Myles and me out to a fabulous fish dinner and then we watch the Germ,an team defeat the Netherlands in Euro Cup Soccer. Today a tour of the Island. Alles Gute!

Busy, busy, busy

Hello everybody. You have to forgive us if we don't write the blog as much as we would like, but we are really busy :P. We are doing the "effort" to embrace all the german passions like beer and soccer/football. With the Eurocup underway we are "busy" watching the games :P. Go Deutschland!!!

Great day. We started out in Schleswig at Schloss Gottorf. Beautiful building with lots of interesting exhibits. I particularly like one about life in the Middle Ages from the town to the city to the monastery to the castle. Then we went to the Globushous with an enormous globe that on the outside looked like the earth as it was understood in the 1700's with the continents and oceans and then ten people could sit inside it and observe the heavens with the stars and the constellations painted on the inside of the globe. And it turned as you sat there. Fascinating. We had a great lunch at a restaurant called Luzifer - I had Labskous, a typical regional dish of potatoes with corned beef and beets, Matjes, pickles, and beets. We all had what we thought was our new favorite beer, Asgaard (paradise).

Then we came back to Bordesholm for a fascinating tour of the Klosterkirche. Who knew that Ashley was an organ virtuoso?

 As usual, we were all very angelic.

The view from above the church was amazing. We were shown the way the walls were built and then taken above where on catwalks we could see the top of the ceiling from above. Then we climbed the tower through these cramped, narrow ladders. It was the kind of tour you never expect to be given. Amazing.

My host in Bordesholm is Uwe Eybächer and he is a baker. In fact an award-winning organic baker. I had the chance to visit his bakery yesterday. It is amazing how many different types of bread they have in Germany, and all of it is delicious.

Public transportation in Germany is great and so many people ride bikes. This is the outside of the train station.

Last night we had a fabulous meal after our presentation at the Bordesholm RC. Steak!

German keyboards

A little challenge directly from germany. Find the difference between the german keyboard (see pic attached) and the american one. Particularly two letters are switched and forget about it when it comes to the right side of it. :P

3 of us have US laptops/ipads, while Arthur and I are confronted with the challenge of a scrambled keyboard :P. So forgive me if I spell "zou" instead of "you"

A token of the fun facts of being in another country :)

Bis bald!!

Sah ein knab ein roslein.....again....Sah ein knab ein roslein....again.. The Germans are loving Röslein and we keep singing it for them. We have another Rotary presentation tonight where we will perform again. I think we should sign a contract. Today I was at a vocational visit at VR Bank in Neumünster.
My vocational host took me to lunch and then to see my host parents at their work place, Media Markt (equivalent of Best Buy in America). There are so many things I have never seen therefore I have taken over 1200 pictures. Schleswig-Holstein is so beautiful and the friends and family's here have greeted us every step of the way with open arms and tried to make us feel like we are at home. So many thanks already, so much fun, and a time we will never forget....to be continued.
 

Bowling in Flensburg



Rathaus in Hamburg




Kinka, Maren, Agus and Ashley having dinner before the District Conference



Röslein performance at District Conference

Lunch break from vocational day in Neumünster

Feeling rested and ready to tackle our last few weeks. Our trip has been extraordinary, our hosts are beautiful families with much to share about culture and their way of life. My visits to local schools never cease to amaze me. Children are the same all over the world, and in the hands of these talented and caring teachers, they will succeed in all their future endeavors. How is every village more beautiful than the next?
~Myles

Amazing what a good night's sleep and a little R&R will do. Everyone looked and sounded much better today. The District Conference dinner last night was very long. The food was good and we enjoyed sitting with our new Bordesholm hosts, but the speeches were very long and needless to say, our German isn't good enough for us to understand what is being said. We had a piano player to accompany us with Röslein and I think we sang well, but the hall was so big we couldn't hear much of the audience singing with us. But we could see lots of smiling faces and DG Wolfgang Mueller-Michaelis was visibly emotional when he thanked us afterward. He said "I so wanted my American friends to be here this evening because I was so moved when I heard their presentation in Husum and their song." I guess it was worth staying. Here is the team waiting to go to dinner last night at the Conference.

And here is one of my favorite guest's at todays birthday barbecue

Feeling like a new person after finally getting to sleep in. Rotary distrct conference in Hamburg was last night and didn't get to my host families house until 1am. I was "resting my eyes" on the drive home. In Bordesholm, Germany with my host family. Just had macchiato and cake! Leaving for Lawrence Furbish's birthday BBQ soon. Now that we have internet we should be posting more pictures and blogging soon :) Tschüss

All of our German friends keep asking "why aren't you blogging" and the answer is, we have not had any Internet for a week. Today we are in Hamburg for the District Conference and finally can make a new entry. The week has been fantastic but now we are all experiencing "overload." So many new people and places! Plön was beautiful and our hosts were all great. We saw a gorgeous country estate of Price Hesse, visited the Plön Castle, had a short but fascinating visit to Lübeck, and visited a Museum in what used to be East Germany which showed what the old Iron Curtain was like. Next it was on to Otterndorf where we were finalize able to stay together in the same place; that was nice. We had vocational days, traveled to a moor for a nature lecture, unfortunately all in German, but the scenery was beautiful and our hosts translated some of it. The next day was excellent with a tour of a Naval Air Base, a visit to a Air Museum featuring Zeppelins, and a visit to the Emigrants Museum in Bremerhaven. Our host Hans-Peter Weber took us for a swim, bought us pizza, and left us alone for the evening. What a nice man! Today was very long - getting up very early, a train ride to Hamburg (without coffee!!!), the team walked around Hamburg and I spent time at the Conference. We ate lunch with the outgoing German team and Wolfgang Janus and did our presentation this afternoon. We got a chance to relax and will be attending the festivities tonight before moving on to Bordesholm sometime late.

The old Iron Curtain.

On the Moor.

Honest, we have been so busy the last few days we have had no time to Blog. (Or we would have been blogging after two in the morning.) Our wonderful hosts in Flensburg have created a fantastic program for us. I feel like I can't describe it all and yet it is hard to know what to leave out. I guess one of the real highlights was the Nautical Simulator at the Maritime Center of the Flensburg University of Applied Sciences. This is used to train captains, pilots and other large ship officers. We climbed into a room that was like the bridge of a large freighter (They have 6 in all and split us into two groups on two ships.) It had controls and displays like a real ship and you looked at computer-generated screens that made it look like you were at sea. That had us take control and maneuver the ships into the harbor and locks, so you were steering and engaging the throttle. There were other moving ships to contend with, both large and small, and various other hazards. It started out calm and then conditions started to change with fresher seas, then dark clouds then bigger waves until suddenly these enormous waves were breaking over the ship and somehow, using the video display that made you feel that the ship was rolling and tossing in the sea - some people had to leave the room because they started to feel sea sick. Even though you knew it was only a simulation, you couldn't help feeling just a bit nervous. It was fantastic. I don't have the best picture of the rough sea now but you can get an idea and maybe we can post a better picture later. Later that day we have a great time bowling and eating pizza then the "kids" went out to a disco and the old team leader home for a quiet drink with his hosts and bed. Maren Weiße  joined us and it was great to see her. Yesterday we had a very interesting tour of Glücksburg Castle and ride over the border so we can say we were in Denmark. (The Danish hotdog with the traditional toppings was fabulous. Last night Eric and Ursula hosted a "Munich" dinner and evening and we stayed up until One AM drinking and singing. Franziska's husband Toby plays a mean piano, Erick played guitar, accordion, harmonica, and percussion. And Arthur blew us away with his hot guitar playing. What a great night. This morning Ich bin ein Schlafmütze (sleepyhead).

Ashley and I getting ready to chow down during our visit to Schleswig.

Eric took me to Schleswig for a great visit with my good friend Claus Nielsky.

A shower during our walk around the nature preserve at Holnis.

Ashley in front of Glücksburg Castle.

Agus and her host mother Maren in Denmark.

And now today we move on to Plön!!!!