Paul and I are in Ingolstadt, Germany, home of Audi.  He's at a cafe catching up with some old friends and I'm at a library using the world's worst computer.  If there is anything wrong with the website over the next day or two, blame it on this computer.

We drove here from Stuttgart this morning and had lunch with Paul's old host family, and tonight we are meeting another of his old host families.  Tomorrow we are headed to Vienna, and I am driving!

The car is holding up nicely.  In addition to voice activated GPS (Paul telling me to look up something in the map), it also has voice activated, in flight coffee and tea service (Paul asking me to plug in our water cooker into the cigarette lighter).  We've found that our two rolls of duct tape make nice cup holders, as our 17-year-old Micra did not come with any.

We also discovered yesterday that the visa agency made a mistake with Paul's Kazakh visa and it expires in two days, long before we even reach Kazakhstan.  I'd hate to miss out on Kazakhstan, but if they don't accept a bribe then we may be forced to take the long way through Russia.  Well, as the Advenurists say, if nothing goes wrong on the trip, then everything has gone wrong!

For now it is great being in a country where we both speak the language.  Even though Germany is a foreign country, it is so familiar to us that it feels like home.  It will certainly be hard to leave.  Many thanks to Paul's many German friends who have been extremely generous to us!  

Vielen Dank!