Stau

Yesterday, we decided to take one last familyday before school begin for us here on Tuesday. Jeff suggested it since he was going to have a busy week with giving welcoming speeches and starting the school year off for the parents and students. He wanted something to take his mind off what was about to come. So yesterday, we told the kids that we were going to spend the day at their favorite amusement park- Europa Park. Anna had been asking to go there since before we left the states. The weather was going to be perfect low 70's with sunshine. So we all got an early start to have a fun day at Europa Park. With only 20 minutes from the park on the Auto bahn we got into some slow traffic and even stopped. Well, we found ourselves in a stau (traffic jam). Everything stopped and then we saw the emergencies vehicles speed past us. We knew that it was a bad accident. We ended up sitting on the autobahn for almost two hours! Believe it or not, this was the first major stau our family has been in since arriving in Germany eight years ago. We were caught between two exits and just sat and waited with the other unlucky motorist on a Sunday morning. This was our view for the wait.

I've always wanted a family picture along a guardrail on the German Autobahn I finally got my wish.

During our almost two hour wait, we endured two couples who spent their time by doing some serious PDA for everyone else. I'm glad that Jacob brought along our portable DVD player so the kids were distracted.

Sarah wanted her picture taken in the middle of the autobahn so I did. It was a festive time with many languages spoken around us German, Italian, French etc. In the spirit of the olympics I asked Jeff if we should start chanting USA, USA. He didn't think that was funny.

Once we finally got moving again. We decided that going to the park wouldn't work out. For the price of admission, there wasn't enough time to feel like we would get our money worth. So we ended up heading to another place that the kids like to go to from time to time called Kinder galaxie. It all worked out and they had a fun time.