We got up early and ran some errands between 9 and 10:30, including buying some German sweets for poor, candy-deprived Kai and exchanging a printer cartridge for my mom‘s printer, and then got ready to leave for our first German car trip. We were already packed but had to wait for Kai, who was looking for (and not finding) his lost wallet. Eventually we had to give up and took off around 11, and drove from Osnabrück to Eckernförde, a small town of about 10,000 on the Baltic. Mark drove my mom’s little Kia, I passed on the info from the iPhone directions, and Kai used his headphones to listen to music for most of the way. (My mom took the train; we were basically the luggage and auto transport system for all of us.) Apart from a few construction sites where traffic slowed down and one stop to have our lunch (sandwiches from a bakery that we had picked up earlier), we didn‘t stop and took the shortest route, so we got there at about 3:20. The woman who manages our vacation rental met us near the rental; she is a friend of my sister‘s and super nice, and the apartment, „Ostseeblick“ („Baltic Ocean View“) is absolutely adorable. It has two bedrooms and a huge living room area with a fully equipped kitchen, including a large dining room that comfortably sits 8. That‘s perfect because my mom and two old friends of the family, Dorothee and Uschi, were in a second rental with much smaller common space, and so we can have everyone and guests have meals and conversations here all week—we‘ll be here until next Monday, June 26, and we‘ll have various visitors.
After we settled in, we briefly checked out the bay that is basically feet from the apartment, across the street and one more row of houses down to the promenade, and right to the beach. It’s a beautiful but very shallow sand beach with a lot of jellyfish and many „beach baskets“—the contraptions the Germans rent for the day to have a place to sit on the beach and a place to store their belongings. But nobody was renting one, because it wasn‘t very nice and kept drizzling off and on, so we saved the beach for later; our main task was actually to get some shopping done so we could all have a meal together later. We managed to get that done by about 5:30, get the food we had home, and then drive to the train station to pick up Imke and Dorothee, who came on the same train. We took them to their vacation rental, in the middle of the very picturesque downtown, and then drove back to our own rental so I could get a German Abendbrot ready for everyone. They all came over around 7, and we ate and talked and had a great time. My sister, who lives only about an hour from here, came about 8:30 and joined us, and we sat and talked some more until everyone got tired and the four of them left. My sister had taken Tuesday off from work to be with us, and was staying overnight, but the other rental was more convenient for that than ours, so we just settled that we‘d get together the next morning. Mark and I took our showers and went to bed with the windows wide open and the sea air coming in. The water in the bay is so quiet, though, that the waves (such as they are) make no sound!