Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Down Time Therapy

Ahhhhh...I feel SO much better! Getting out of Belgium and hanging out with some friends was just what the doctor ordered. Don't get me wrong, I have people here that I enjoy hanging out with, but it's different when there's not various hidden strings attached or underlying motives. 

Eric & I headed over to Olsbrücken,Germany which is about a half hour from Ramstein Air Force Base. The town is very pretty and nestled in the hillsides, no high amounts of traffic. All around, it was very very peaceful and totally loved it. Our friends live in an old flour mill that was restored & converted into various "condos", there's several different units and it's right next to a little river and surrounded by trees. Ah! I loved it! Sorry, I didn't bother taking my camera with me because, frankly, I wanted to enjoy my down time rather than lugging it around. 

We got to catch up with friends, tormented their red head son, and attempted to steal their 2 year old Basset hound which is nicknamed "Dumb Drops" because she's a little on the "special" side..all while hanging out, enjoying the amazing weather (yes! I actually got some sun!) AND getting our retail needs filled. For the most part, I behaved as well as I could with my diet over there considering there's a current  E. coli outbreak and all of the restaurants we ate at weren't serving lettuce, tomatoes, spinach or cucumbers..sooo that kinda took away the majority of my options! So, even though I ate at The Big Emma's and even at Macaroni Grill, I managed to get a good amount of walking in..so I think everything balanced out :)

 Since we were able to raid Ramsteins massive BX, I managed to pick up some things I've been wanting:

The last few times I've been there, I always see this vendor with wood-burned family signs (you can have them customized) with various pictures of Germany on it. You can get a standard German village with a bell tower, the German mountains, Neuschwansein Castle (the one that looks like the Walt Disney castle) or you can have a blank board with your family name on it. I opted for thenmountainside with a watermill. Most of the signs said," Germany" or " Deutschland"on the banner, but I preferred to have it say "Est. 2007" considering we live in Belgium, not Germany (TONS of people back in the States always ask me how Germany is...I'm not in that country!) and I know whenever I look at the sign, *I* know that we got it in Germany ;) It's painted very nicely and the whole piece is about the size of a large dinner plate:


Since I was waiting on the guy to do my sign, I ventured around and ended up finding a new lock wallet by Vera Bradley in addition to some makeup bags I was looking for. I'm sure you're asking "Erika, why did you get two makeup bags?"...well, the smaller one is for my purse and it'll help organize the chaos in there and the other one is for my weekend travel bag :)


One thing lead to another and I some how ended up over at The Body Shop. So, I got some much needed olive body butter, coconut lip butter, face cleaning stuff as well as some goodies to pamper my feetsies.




  All in all, I'm really looking forward to going back there later in July / early August!

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