How to be Surprised

A giant yellow frog was hopping on the end of my bed this morning.

Hop.

Hop.

Hop.

Yellow only because the Kindergartner was donned in my eleven year-old Budapest Vacation Bible School t-shirt scrawled in Hungarian, clip art, and impossible-to-remove blueberry stains.

The Silverspoon house was completely gutted, and represented the beginnings of an art gallery, as Gloria described it, with all that blank wall. So down in the bunker kitchen we heard about their adventures in Jamaica and the Grand Caymans – a private tour of waterfalls in the rain forest. Theodore was even so bold as to cliff-jump into the jungle pool, and swim under the waterfall – to the terror of their personal Jamaican guide – to the hidden cave beyond. They gifted us with chocolate rum cake, cigars (whose origin shall remain nameless), and pirate shirt for Puck. He liked it enough to offer continued verbal thanks about eight times throughout the early afternoon.

So… the Bear likes cooking surprises.

Normally he gives away the punchline before the whole joke’s started because he’s so excited to surprise me. But he really does try. And after Puck had been installed in the kitchen where super-Carrie was composing a complicated chicken salad and brownies for Mom’s and Dad’s friends-family-picnic-concert evening somewhere beyond, we hit the road.

I guessed West.

I guessed right.

But I hadn’t thought of Hermann. Apparently one of the Bear’s Bible study-work buddies very generously offered us a bed & breakfast reservation he had been unable to use… So there we were – high in the German hills on an unexpected early anniversary enterprise.

Dinner took some thinking. I don’t drink – for reasons best described in future meanderings – and the Bear doesn’t drink often, or much. But given that we were sandwiched in the heart of wine country, when in Rome…

No, I didn’t.

But the menu offered intriguing concoctions, so we ate.

“This place isn’t so fancy,” the Bear told me, noting several passerby in motorcycle tees. “I will judge it by the quality of their schnitzel.”

Maybe I’m just a culinary coward, but, when you visit a German town where they stuff everything with cabbage, onions, and potatoes… well, what do you expect from me?

I ordered the grilled cheese.

I’m not complaining – absolutely, I’m not. A grilled cheese is almost a universal guaranteed slam dunk. So while the Bear wolfed into a meat pie, we did share a plate of sweet potato chips and beet chips – how’s that for exotic – with sour cream dip. And even a bottle of the winery’s very own sparkling raspberry… juice.

Ok, so I’m ten.

But it was good.

Anyway, we enjoyed our respective perspectives of the palate inside the refurbished stables, our table positioned just about where some grand old German plow-horse must once have called home sweet home.

Then we hit up the cemetery on the hill.

Yes, yes. I know, I know.

“Dad! Not another cemetery! People think our family is so weird.”

But the tradition carries on.

Maybe I weird-ify myself even more with that eerie thought I think – which graves hold the souls of the redeemed, and which the damned… I just can’t help myself. Graveyards are good life checks. We roamed the stones under a gray sunset and painfully quiet German hills. The Bear was feeling the start of a neck-ache, but we pondered several dozen stones sculpted with weeping willows or those demented skulls cut with crossed bones. I deduce the mean life expectancy was somewhere in the early fifties for most folk, which I imagine was a decent number for 1800’s pioneers. Valiant old chaps.

Our digs back up on the hill were about as spacious as our living room and kitchen put together, not to mention personal hot tub. Whenever I see water bubbling at a rich 104 degrees, I wonder just how well-roasted I’m expected to appear on the dinner plates that particular evening. And then I remember I don’t live in the original version of Hansel & Gretyl. Less horrifically, I am reminded of the Blue Lagoon three years ago in a cold March. So that makes me feel better. And I forget that my liver is cooking.

And we may or may not have watched the first half of “Nacho Libre”.

On purpose.

See – anyone can write a decent food and lodging review.