Day 14 by the numbers

Number of....

Beers: 2
Wendish/Sorbian towns:  lots
Spaghetti ice cream:  1
Hours driven:  4
Churches: 1
Sorbian museums: 1
Potato restaurants: 1
River sources:  1

Today was all about driving to see where family was potentially from.  We essentially plugged towns into Faith and drove to see what there is to see.  It was a nice Sunday afternoon drive on a day not Sunday.

I'd like to first point out something retrospective having now been back for two weeks from the trip.  Between Bautzen and Wittenberg, I can't tell which one had the most anticipation built up for our trio.  Bautzen was a life long dream for my mom and my dad was getting into it.  What I can liken this area of Germany to is exactly the area my mom's family is from, with a few more hills and no red dirt.  The creek below looks like the creek from Giddings.  But there's a major difference.  Giddings, Dime Box, Lexington, Caldwell, Serbin, etc all feel like home. There is no way to explain how I feel about those places or what they have meant to me growing up.  When I was younger and dumber, I used to dream about how great it will be to introduce my one day hubby to the joys of City Meat BBQ from Giddings or how red dirt doesn't wash out of clothes or how fishing with a cane pole is how God meant it to happen.  This trip, more than any other, has given me a greater appreciation that trying to make a place feel like home for someone else or care more about a piece of land just because it's tied to someone's roots that you love, doesn't confer the same feelings to that person.  Bautzen and the area were just that:  a nice place to drive and see, but I felt no real connection to it.  Give me Dime Box any day of the week.  It could have been that we overhyped the idea of seeing where mom was from, but I generally feel that because we had no real connection to the place, no memories to fall back on that it just wasn't what we hoped it would be.  And I can no longer expect a future husband, friend or child to understand my strange attachment to cities that have no form of entertainment or added value.

But it wouldn't be a good blog post without visuals:
Source of the Spree

 

 

Fields and fields of yellow:

 

Some of the small towns we hit along the way where we think family might be from:

 

After a few small towns that were no bigger than Dime Box (actually, Dime Box might have made them look big), we headed to Cottbus, which is on the northern edge of Sorbian country.  Saw a church (name escapes me, but it was Lutheran):

 



 

 

 

 

 

Had lunch at a place that serves potatoes and more potatoes.  We look thrilled in the picture below, but the potatoes were really good.  Strangest most delicious mashed potatoes I've ever had. 

 

After a long day of driving, I was exhausted, so we headed back to Bautzen for ice cream, where we tried Spaghetti ice cream that we had seen so many eating in Germany.  It's shaped like Spaghetti on the outside with crushed nuts for the "cheese".  Those silly Germans.  This thing about put us all in a sugar coma.

We did the beer from the grocery store thing again.  Good times.