Smash & Grab, Baby!

If you're a regular reader of my blog, you'll remember the post about when I attended the Bazaar in Germany a few weeks ago in addition to venturing over to Bernkastle to pick up some pottery for Eric. Well, that day didn't end well...so Eric and I figured we'd attempt again sometime in the Spring to return there since the winter weather doesn't exactly make the drive very enjoyable.

We didn't stick with that plan. 

Yesterday, we made our way over Spangdahlem AB to do some shopping since our "local" base isn't exactly known for their wide selection of goods. For the last several days, Europe has been getting smacked with numerous snow storms which has made life a lil more...errr.. difficult for people who aren't exactly experts with driving in those type of road conditions. Since Eric gets to drive to Spangdahlem several times a month, he was volunteered to do the driving since I'm usually a nervous wreck when there's snow / ice on the road. I will say, though, that the scenery was really pretty!

 For the life of me, I don't understand why Belgium only salted one lane of the highway. You could tell that only one side was done, which sucked! Made the drive take ten times longer and people were driving rather stupid to bypass slower moving vehicles. 

 Perfect example of how the roads looked in Belgium. You can see on the left hand side that there's road tracks from cars that passed by, but you could see them slip and slide a little bit when driving through the snow / ice.

Once we hit the German border, the roads INSTANTLY got better! It was SUCH a relief! The whole highway was plowed and salted..so nice! 

Random cow statue I liked when we stopped to refuel:

Once we reached Spangdahlem and did out shopping, we ran over to Bitburg since I was wanting to check out the Polish pottery shop I had heard about. Honestly, I was expecting a decent amount of selection...I was wrong, sadly. When we were leaving the shop, I stopped into a small antique shop that had some really cool little signs and paintings. I fell in love with a pizza paddle that had edelweiss painted all over it! I love love love edelweiss! In addition to the pizza paddle, I found another cute little sign that is rather fitting for our bathroom...haa...

 From there, we headed on over to Bernkastle to attempt, yet again, to invade the pottery shop since Eric was really wanting those bowls and I wanted to get them for him as his part of his Christmas gift. We ended up taking a different route to get there and the countryside was SO so pretty! 

I was getting a little nervous once we actually got to Bernkastle since we started seeing signs with huge red "x"s through them as if they were saying the town was shut down or something. It was a little unsettling considering we had driven the extra distance JUST for that shop and it would've been our luck that it was shut down or something. Who knows...maybe the town was inaccessible due to heavy snow fall or something. Turns out that the heart of the town was shut down due to road reconstruction. We managed to find a parking spot not too far from there and walked the rest of the way in :)

A pretty view of the vineyard:

There was actually a Christmas Market going on in the town, but it was a little on the disappointing side. I guess I'm used to the larger ones from Aachen, Brussels and Brugge. This one mainly had vendors selling food and drinks and everyone was hanging out and getting drunk, lol. I suppose that's really the only thing to do when it's all cold and snowy...eat, drink and gossip!

Got to the store, gathered up all the bowls that Eric had wanted in addition to a a few butterbells that were requested on the behalf of some people, then rolled out! I think we spent barely ten minutes in the place since we were just wanting to get our stuff and head on home. Word on the street was that there was another snow storm that was inbound..and we could feel it in the air, as funny as that sounds. 

Here are the bowls we picked up...Eric's a very happy camper, lol. You can see how large they are (figured that holding one of 'em can help gauge the size)...two of 'em have handles cause they're deemed to be used as soup bowls, lol.

So! Not too shabby! Got to run around the Belgian / German countryside, picked up some TV shows we've been wanting for a while, got some cool goodies for the house in addition to the coveted bowls that Eric has wanted for some time. NO MORE traveling around in crappy weather for a while :)