All growed up

It's October in Germany. And that means it's a little depressing outside. So I'm a little depressed inside. I just realized that we're officially ... adults.

We sold our beloved, fun, and zippy Ford Ka and replaced it with a more staid and zzz-inducing station wagon. I just got promoted to supervisor and now work more.

Kate’s having a friggin baby.

I made my own cheese recently and get WAY too excited about that. BOR-ING!

Kate insisted we get a picture of her practicing her civic duties and voting for president.

And, similar to my cheese overjoy, Kate got all sorts of excited about our new bedspread. (Pecos obviously is wary of all these changes.)

So, I wanted to take a moment to reminisce about the great times Kate and I had with the Ka…..during our sometimes incredibly long car trips.

In the two years and two months we had the Ford Ka, we traveled about 30,000 miles, more than the circumference of the globe. Now, that may seem pretty normal for the U.S., but when you consider that I walk to work and that Kate only uses the car to run errands and take Pecos to the fields, the number is pretty astonishing.

Here’s a list of some of the more massive driving trips we took with our Navy Bean:
Switzerland – Aug 06: 1000 km
Munich – Sep 06: 900 km
Holland – Oct 06: 900 km
Paris, Strasburg – Nov 06: 1600 km
Nürnberg – Dec 06: 600 km
Grafenwoehr – Jan 07: 725 km
Paris – Mar 07: 1200 km
Hamburg, Amsterdam – Apr 07: 1500 km
Switzerland – Apr 07: 1000 km
Garmisch – Apr 07: 1200 km
Berlin – May 07: 1250 km
Dresden, Wroclaw, Krakow, Prague – May 07: 2400 km
Rothernburg ob der Tauber – Oct 07: 450 km
Switzerland – Nov 07: 1000 km
Nancy, Metz, Luxembourg, Trier – Feb 08: 600 km
Zermatt, Milan, Turin, Geneva – Mar 08: 1900 km
Bruges, Keukenhof – May 08: 1250 km
Salzburg, Dolomites – May 08: 1400 km
Prague – June 08: 1200 km
Berlin – Aug 08: 1250 km
Sylt, Copenhagen – Aug 08: 2100 km

Here's our Ka covered in snow in Switzerland.

Plus countless trips to Heidelberg, Rüdesheim, Limburg, Köln, Kaiserslautern, which I’ll estimate at about 7,000 km, bringing our total road trip miles to about 20,000 miles. This means that about 68 percent of the mileage we put on that car were roadtrips. That’s pretty good. What percentage do you do?

By the way, here's me and that crazy unnamed dog from the last blog jumping into a vortex like the ones Bubbles from HBO's The Wire created on the last episode of Heroes.