Words of Hope – What I Did On My Summer Vacation

August 7, 2013:  I am taking a brief hiatus from my 5 year recollection of my experience with leukemia and bone marrow transplant to update everyone on “what I did on my summer vacation”.  For the past two weeks, my family and I have been traveling through Germany.  We arrived in Frankfurt, Germany on July 22nd.  At the airport we met Isabel and Florian, our German friends.  Isabel, is my bone marrow donor and Florian is her boy friend.  They are 23 and 27 respectively.  Mind you, I am 41.  Isi and Florian were our guides for the next 7 days as we would travel through the Southern Region of Germany called the Swabian Alps.

We were a bit tired upon our arrival, but stashed our bags and went with Isi to meet her family and see her home in Rottenburg.   We met Christian, Isabel’s father.  He is a police office and hostage negotiator. Silvia is Isi’s Mom, and Michele is Isi’s sister, who is 15.  They are terrifically nice people as you can imagine, having raised Isabel to be so gracious and giving.  Silvia prepared a traditional lunch with the family.  I was able to get Ian to try a little, Joe not so much luck…

I will continue this story for the next couple days…  It was a little too difficult to blog on the fly with limited access to the internet and lots of sites to see….