our boys, family, friends and acquaintances: chat messages, phone calls and blogs do not replace coming together. Simply sitting together, talking about important or trivial things and exchanging emotions is irreplaceable. In addition, we also miss family events, the 80th birthday of Heidi, the wedding celebration of Petra and Joerg. How lovely that we spent ten days with Philipp in the Pyrenees. And in the last few weeks, we met some friends from home, more or less surprisingly.
When traveling, an e-book is very practical: small and easy, able to be fed at any time with new reading material, to read at night without a headlamp in the tent. When I see someone with a printed book , however, I still get a longing to hold a real book in my hands, to feel it, to smell it and, of course, to read it. It is similar with the newspaper. On normal riding days we do not have time for it, on rest days we mostly load up the e-newspaper. This cannot be compared to reading a printed newspaper. We do not miss the bad news – even if sticking your head in the sand does not help (if you stick your head in the sand, you have to be able to breathe with the A…).
Music is beautiful, important and indispensable for Rolf. At least we have a jukebox with us that provides a little background. To hear a record on a high quality system again would be great. We also miss the live music in the Q, our music bar in Marburg.
We have always enough to eat. The kitchen at home allows with many spices, more plates and oven, but a more varied time. We only have salt, pepper, chilli and herbs of Provence with us.
Collecting berries, plums and apples and thus treats such as baking cakes or cooking jam and hamstering the supplies for the winter is simply fun. Astrid does hardly bear to cycle passsing tons of blackberries for weeks. At a campsite in June, a large pot of apricot jam was boiled. That is when you get really jealous. And homemade cake tastes so much better than bought cake. Also the homemade jam – Philipp has fortunately brought us two glasses from this year’s production.
We miss a strong talent for language . How nice it would be if we could parry more with the locals. So we help ourselves with German, English, hand and foot.
Only the hairdresser we do not miss anymore. Rolf had his hair cut in Bilbao and Astrid in Nantes. From now on it was just unbearable, even if growing hair is exciting.