A quick trip to the Ramstein Air Base

Today is a federal holiday so I had the day off of work.  We drove to the Ramstein Air Base (about 70 miles south of Wiesbaden) for lunch at Macaroni Grill.  Oscar ordered cheese pizza and Calvin got chicken strips and french fries.  Tina got chicken and shrimp scaloppine.  I ordered a pepperoni and sausage pizza.

On the way there, I took a photo of a scenic tower off a ways in the distance.  You can see there is still a lot of snow on the ground and the grape vines are all brown and dormant.

On an unrelated note, the army came on January 4th and took back the loaner bed that we had in our guest room.  We had been told when it was issued in July that we were only authorized to keep it for 90 days but multiple people had told us that they had kept theirs for years and nobody would ever ask for it back until we were going to be coming back to the States.  Things were going great with that bed (Susan slept on it when she came for a visit in October) until the week before Christmas.  Two of my coworkers came in to work that week and said that they had gotten calls saying the Army wanted their furniture back.  They called us the next day.  We really aren't sure why they asked for it back but we had kept it much longer than they initially told us we could have it so there wasn't much to argue with about that.

Obviously a guest room without a bed isn't much of a guest room so we needed to get another bed in there.  We had been checking the classified ads for a used bed (bookoo.com is a Craigslist-like network for military communities) but the beds that looked decent were being sold the same day they were being posted.  This past week Tina found a futon couch for sale that looked decent.  We made arrangements to buy it.  The only problem is that the family lived about 15 miles from Ramstein.  The drive to Ramstein is a bit of a trek so we were glad we were able to grab the futon on a day when we were planning on coming to the area anyway.

We picked the futon up on the way home.  It was shoved in the back of the Odyssey with about two feet sticking out the back.  We drove home with the lift-gate partially open.  The futon would have fit inside the van if I had been able to remove the first row captain's chairs.  But, of course, the boys were sitting in those chairs so we had a bit of a chilly ride back to Wiesbaden.  My neighbor helped me get it up the stairs into the guest room so we are officially welcoming guests again.