October 17 Bonn

Today was a day of sight seeing with Dr. Klaus Martin Lotz.  He is the former officer for international relations for the DBV.  He has worked with many McCloy groups over the years and wanted to take us around.  He is a funny older man with a crazy laugh.  I think we wore him out; he seemed tired by the end of the day.

We first went to the Rhineland cultural heritage open-air-museum, a museum of traditional German homes from the different time periods over the last 300 years.  It was interesting for the first little while, but after nearly 3 hours I was ready to go.  We did see a very interesting wind powered grain mill.  The entire mill could be turned in any direction so as to face the optimal direction to capture the wind to power the mill.  It was amazing to me to see the construction of such machine with the technology they had at the time.  We had a very good lunch in the little restaurant that was part of the museum.  Fried potatoes and sausage, simple but very good.

From there we went to the wine growing region.  I never cease to be amazed at the way they raise the grapes on such steep hill side, often they have to build rock walls to keep the trees from sliding down the hill, buy the grapes do very well.  We toured a security bunker that the German government had built in an old train tunnel during the Cold War.  It as a little interesting but an hour and half tour was about an hour and twenty minutes too long.

We did have a very interesting conversation with our host.  He told of his memories of seeing the sky filled with planes flying over to bomb German cities during the war.  He also told of his father being taken away by American troops (he later returned).  His fear is that we will get into another world war with Iran.  It was very interesting to hear the perspective of a man who remembers first hand the horrors of war in his own land.

Tomorrow we are off to Brussels, our last stop before heading for home.  It is hard to believe we have seen so much in three weeks, at the same time it is hard to believe we have been here for three weeks and the trip is coming to an end.

 Stefan Metzdorf, Garrick, Raquel, Paul, Robert, and Matthias Mehner