Mittendorf

Went for our mess hall breakfast, but we got stopped at the 2nd gate for runners (a race of some kind). There was a guy who told me I’d have to wait for the runners to go by. I incorrectly assumed he meant the handful that were coming up the road just then. Nope, he meant all of them. As I watched runner after runner coming up the road way off in the distance, I finally asked how we’d know when they’d all gone by and he said an orange ambulance will be behind the last one. So I asked if we should turn around & come in at the other gate, but he said that’s where they were running TO, so that’d be closed as well. A few minutes later, a captain got out of his car and was very vocal about this being badly planned and he had to get to work and they needed to find a way to get us all on the road again. (We had been sitting there for probably 10 minutes by this point.) They didn’t bite immediately, but they let us get moving within 5 minutes of that.

Turns out the mess hall was on way early breakfast (6-8:30), so we’d have missed it anyway. So off to BK we went, only to see about 50 soldiers out in front of the food court/PX. I was just sure the line was going to be insane. There were about 10 soldiers in front of us in the line, but they all ended up just getting beverages, so we were through very quickly. After breakfast, we played at one of the playgrounds for a little while, and then headed home for nap.



Miracle of miracles, Wee Laddie fell asleep in the car with just a short out-of-the-way jaunt to lengthen the drive. (I love it when that actually works.) And he had an almost-2-hour nap and was still back up by 2pm. So we had a late lunch and headed off to Nittendorf (Mittendorf, according to Wee Laddie), a town a few autobahn exits from here, for their Bürgerfest. It was small and interesting… parts of it were like a flea market. But they had two stage areas… one seemed to feature more traditional entertainment, the other had different groups of young performers including some dancers (like whatever they do now instead of breakdancing) and a garage band that was pretty decent.

It was awfully hot, so we spent much of our time hopping from one shady spot to the next. We got ice cream cones and gave Wee Laddie a chance to make some bubbles at a play area set up for the kids. Wandered around a bit and decided to get dinner while we were there, rather than rushing home only to have to make something. My lazy side loves that my husband likes to eat out so often. So we had baguettes that I managed to order mostly in German and headed home just in time for Wee Laddie’s bedtime.