Well, now it’s not just raining it’s pouring – buckets and buckets of rain.  It’s called a Tropical Storm.  We had at least 5″ of rain in 24 hrs.  And, coming from Southern California this is quite amazing to watch.  It’s like being on the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland which is the only place I remember seeing lots of rain when I was a kid.  Whenever I try to take a picture my camera lens steams up ’cause it’s so warm.  They opened the flood gates upstream so our lazy river is now a raging torrent of muddy water with lots of woody debris rushing by.

Since there’s not much to report on from us at the moment, I’ll tell you about our son Justin.  He and Lauren are celebrating their honeymoon/one year anniversary with an amazing bicycle trip in Europe.  You get to read their story today.

We received this email this morning.

Hello!

We just wanted to let you know we made it and are checked into our first hotel in Passau. It’s a neat old town.

We are catching up, but are still exhausted from staying up for 48 hours. I was taking an involuntary nap in the train station in Amsterdam, but the police informed us that wasn’t allowed. I sat up, but after he left passed out again on accident when Justin went to look around. We didn’t realize we would have to hang out in Amsterdam for 8 hours before our train and it was really hard to stay awake.

Our sleeper train car filled up with a loud middle eastern family… tons of women and kids with one man looking over them, maybe the husband for everyone? Anyway they thought they were in our car and we let them take it over while we hung out in an empty one until the train ticket person came to tell them they were wrong and in fact supposed to be in a whole different section on the train. Then finally we could sleep. I didn’t even wake up when German border patrol agents came to check our passports in the middle of the night.

Just had a wonderful dinner at the hotel after walking around town, and taking a nap. Bike is together and ready to go.

Another highlight so far was a big salty pretzel we got in Munich, sliced with creamy butter to go with our morning cappuccinos.

Oh yeah, and we decided not to bring our computers!