Twas the night before vacation.....

...and all through the house we were running around like a cat after a mouse.

Or something like that.

Most of the packing is done (just the last minute items need to go in the bags), the house is cleaned, the note to the pet/plant sitter is written, the mail and paper are stopped, the boarding passes are printed and the bank has been called so that they don't put a fraud hold on the debit card. That would be a drag. Oh, and the pictures have all been downloaded and cleared from my camera.

I think we all have a little case of pre-trip jitters. It'll feel good to actually hit the road in the morning.

The first half of the trip is well planned and the last half we'll kind of wing as we go along. We'll land at the Cologne-Bonn airport Wednesday morning. After picking up the van we'll go to Aachen and explore a bit there. That was Charlemagne's capital city and he's buried there. We'll spend the night there. Thursday we'll drive down the Rhine to Kamp-Bornhofen and stay the night at the Castle Liebenstein and maybe take a sightseeing boat trip down the Rhine. Friday we'll drive up to the Netherlands and spend the night in Amersfoort. Saturday morning we'll make the short drive over to Ermelo (still in the Netherlands) and visit friends of ours there. After visiting and lunch with them we'll make our way toward Bremerhaven. From Bremerhaven we'll go on to Berlin and from there we'll loop on back to Cologne to catch our flight back home.

I've decided not to take my laptop so we'll be posting whenever and wherever we get the chance. Maybe not until we get home ;-).