Growing up I dreamed of moving away and living some place else. In a big city like Cologne or Hamburg or Berlin. Or in a different country. Anywhere but here. I never followed through with it for several reasons. I lived in Stockholm for 6 months once, but moved back to my small home town and continued to my college education at a university in the huge Ruhr metropolitan area (“Ruhrgebiet”), to which my small home town belongs.
And even though I still could very well imagine to live somewhere else some day, I actually grew to like it here a lot. Maybe not the small town per se, but definitely the location of it. Big city life is just a 30 minutes car-ride away, but so are also the outdoors in the opposite direction. Actually it takes less than 30 minutes to the forests and lakes and rivers. It’s the small town on the edge of the big cities after all. Anyway, it’s not the worst place to live.
There are a couple of water reservoirs south of were I live and due to my job I knew that the restaurant at one of them had re-opened and was pretty good and had a nice patio with a beautiful view of the lake. So today I took my mom there for lunch (well, I drove, she paid *g*) and we had a lovely time. They didn’t serve lunch on Sundays but a brunch buffet from 10 AM till 2 PM, which we didn’t know in advance. It didn’t matter, because the brunch was really good and served as a perfect lunch as well.
We went for a short walk after lunch, because it was just such a wonderful day to be outside today. It’s about time though, because it’s almost June! Only 18 more days until my Scotland trip. And there are still so many things un-planned or un-organized. I better stop thinking about that for now, because otherwise I’d go crazy and spend the rest of the night in front of the computer looking up stuff on the internet and making plans. I will do that tomorrow. Tomorrow is a public holiday in Germany so I’ve got the day off work and can spend it on vacation planning (and a few other wonderful relaxing things).