Our First Adventurous Weekend - Benegerm?

Thank the Lord! We finally have a car! It may be just a rental, but it has 4 doors, 4 wheels, some seats, and an engine!! We finally get to go exploring! Our spacious hotel loft was quickly closing in on the kids and me over the last few days, and we are grateful for finally having some freedom!

This is our Peugeot Oxygo. It's tiny, but most of the cars around here are, so it fits in. Even though I can drive a stick shift, I don't think I'll be driving this car, or any car around here, any time soon. The people here drive way too fast on super narrow roads with no shoulders, just bike paths and sidewalks that are way too close to the speeding traffic for comfort. We are so very grateful for 'Jill,' the GPS unit Adam got from his parents for Christmas. She has unlimited European maps updates, and she tells us what lanes to be in, to keep right or left, and how to navigate through these crazy streets with no names. I don't know how anyone new to Europe ever figured out how to get around over here without a GPS.

Anyways, we have a car. Adam's been riding around with Ralph and other guys from his group, so he understands a little bit about driving and has already been so several places, like SHAPE and Schinnen. I'll tell you more about how wonderful Schinnen is in all its 50's Army glory in another post. Just know for now that it is a US Army Garrison. We drove up there on Friday, and it was our first stop on our day trip on Saturday.

Benelux is an actual term used around here regarding Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemborg. They joined together to kind of start the first European Union-ish. You can read more about it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benelux. I guess you could say we took a day trip through Benegerm (not a real term used here, but one I like =): Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany.

Like I said, we started out at our hotel in Belgium and headed to USAG Schinnen. It's in the Netherlands, about a half hour away. The borders are open over here, so the first time I crossed into the Netherlands, I didn't even realize it. The only indication that you're crossing a border is just a sign along the road.

Most of the freeways are lined with trees, making seeing the countryside difficult in many places, like you're driving through a green tunnel. When you do get a chance to look out, you can see the beautiful green countrysides, with groves of trees all over, planted fields, cattle grazing in pastures. It's mostly flat with soft hills all over. The cities are very different, with no spaces between the buildings, and crazy roundabouts and street patterns. On one street in Tongeren, where opposing traffic was making left-hand turns, there was one lane of oncoming traffic, one going our way making the left, another for oncoming left-turners, and the fourth going our way again, but straight. Scary!!

Ok, back to our trip. After doing what we needed to do at Schinnen, we decided to head down to Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany. We knew it would be about a 2 hour drive, but we had nothing better to do and someone else's gas in the car. (Yes, we know we'll have to replace it, but still, we needed to go somewhere!) This drive was so nice. We headed south from the Netherlands back into Belgium, which we thought was odd, but Jill said to go that way, so we did.

Apparently, Belgium is running an ad campaign against drunk driving, so we saw these billboards all over. They have a picture of a driver with a coffin for a head and two statements. The Dutch one asks something like: "Hungover this weekend?"

The German one asks: "Will the alcohol be the nail in your coffin?"

There are also many, many windmills over here. Huge ones, gigundous ones, all over. I love it! And, Rachael likes them, too =) Yay, windmills!

We crossed into Germany. Now, let's talk about drivers in Germany for a minute. Granted, we only spent a few hours driving through Deutschland, and we have only heard about the Auto Bahn and have not actually driven on it ourselves, but we began to notice a trend. Adam was driving the Peugoet over the posted speed limit to keep up with the slow drivers in the right-hand lane. Yet, we were getting passed at ferocious speeds on the left by so many other drivers. Might it be that they think they're still driving on the Auto Bahn, rather than just a European Interstate? Who knows? Continuing on...

We made it to Spangdahlem Air Base. Adam said it reminded him of Lackland AFB. There were so many familiar American restaurant chains. Pop-Eyes, Taco Bell, Subway, Burger King, and many more. I couldn't help but think of my friends who had spent four years here, imagining them going to the Commissary and driving on these same roads. We saw so many of the same services as are found on Hill AFB (but where's the BX?), just with different numbers in the names. Hill's buildings were mostly tan and brown; Spang's were more yellow, but still had the same feel. Then, I thought of my other friends who will be moving here in March 2012. Will they like it here? I had to see what housing is like!

I'm not sure what I was expecting. It turned out to be typical military housing. Lots of horrible apartments, and some duplexes, the exact same house right next to the other, sometimes with a different paint scheme, lots of plastic kids' toys in the yards. I was surprised by the lack of fenced in yards, but otherwise, it was nothing less than it should have been. What really got us was: 'Where are the people?' It was a Sunday, and the whole base seemed pretty empty, rather un-busy. Hmmm......

We continued our journey. We weren't planning on visiting Bitburg, but it wasn't much of a detour on our way back to the hotel. So, we drove by. We didn't really know what Bitburg was, we just knew it was a town with some sort of US military presence. After some Googling later, I found out that it was another Air Base, home of the 36th Fighter Wing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitburg_Air_Base). We didn't know that, though, and we couldn't figure out where the gate was even if we wanted to get in. We ended up driving all the way around it, discovering that we missed an exit at the first roundabout that would have taken us right in. Regardless, we could see into it. Again, it was sterotypically military. We saw the Commissary, knew there was a BX in there (we had asked at Spang where theirs was and were told SPang's is tiny and the better one was here at Bitburg). It had that same dirt-colored look to all of the buildings. So, that was that.

Then, leaving Bitburg, on the way back to the freeway, we were driving through more scenic countryside and just couldn't help reveling in the beauty of it all. The landscape reminded us so much of home, the flat Prairie, with young green crops of grain, yellow canola/rape seed fields, and fallow ground all intermixed. What a wonderful last sight before the long drive back.





A map of our trip:











On Sunday we did a little house hunting. We had not talked to anyone about actually entering the houses, but Adam had found a few on the websites that he wanted to look at, so we drove around a little. The houses here are so cute. They're small, but they have character. I can easily imagine us living in several of the ones we looked at. They don't have all the amenities found in most American houses, like dishwashers, window screens, disposals, or even stand-up showers, but they're so cute it just doesn't matter =)

We ended up passing through Tongeren after looking at the houses. And, though we've been living near Tongeren for the last week, this was the first time I had been in the town. It is cramped and tiny with wall-to-wall brick buildings hovering over narrow streets, but I loved it! It was Sunday, and the famous Antiek Markt was just wrapping up (http://www.antiekmarkttongeren.be/). All through the streets vendors were packing up their tables and wares. Ooh, this is something I will definitely have to check out more thoroughly this summer. It runs only on Sundays, every Sunday, from 7am to 1 pm. When Adam told one of his commanders/captains/? that we would be living near Tongeren, he said his wife would kill to be going with us because of this Antique Market. Thankfully, I'm not dead, but I'm here! And I'll let you know what I find when I do eventually get down the the Antiek Markt =)

So, we had a pretty good weekend. The kids and I got out of the hotel. We saw some of the most beautiful countryside I've ever seen and drove around in countries I've only dreamed about visiting. We've started our house hunting, and hopefully very soon we'll find one we can call our own, for a few years anyways. All in all, we had a pretty wonderful weekend, made even sweeter by a Mother's Day breakfast of Adam's yummy pancakes and Rachael's super sweet "Happy Mother's Day, Mom!" I don't know if life can get any better for us, because I feel like we're in heaven. Ta ta!