Friday is spent in the same fashion. Meeting more of Alex's' friends and colleagues, meeting up with friends from the job we had done (wow! like a week and a half ago now!!). And a walk in the evening's setting sun along the Rhine, and meeting more of Alex's' friends and chatting and discussing and joking and living.

I've started to read one of the books about life in the KZ Mittleba-Dora. We'll discourse that in a future update.

Saturday 03 July 1999 finds me in a big steel tube hurtling through the skies back towards the shore of my birth. And please forgive me for not having done an update in the last five days or so. I guess I have been too busy living life to take the time out to put it all into bits and bytes for your pleasure and leisure. I'm going my best to fill in the holes, but there is some stuff that is still percolating around in my head, and some stuff that isn't of consequence to you, and stories that are best told over a beer or a late summer campfire in the great north woods. Which suddenly brings to mind the only poem known by every citizen of Minnesota. Let me share it with you briefly.

From the land of sky blue waters, From the land of pines, lofty balsam, comes a beer refreshing. Hamm's, the beer refreshing. Hamm's.

It could almost be a haiku of a sort. One that features a bear with a beer belly tipping a canoe over a waterfall. So, let the bear and the beer amuse you while I sort all this week out in my head, and start cracking the whip on myself to get my photographs scanned in and touched up. One or the other, new photos or new days, will show up here on the site. In the meantime, for those who don't read the site with a fine toothed comb every other day, you can link here to read an essay I wrote after having been to the Dom in Aachen.