Reply #13: Not any more

[DFW]

The Netherlands is one big traffic jam (or parking lot, at times), and most of
our part of Germany (NRW) is so clogged with traffic, it sometimes takes twice
as long by car to get somewhere as by train.

Of course, it helps if the trains are running. The German train system, once the
very definition of efficiency, has gone way downhill in recent years, with spending
on maintenance down to levels not conducive to punctuality.

My daughter was born in Europe, spent time in the Pacific in high school, went to
undergraduate school in Washington, D.C., and has traveled in Egypt. She is pretty
much a "multi-culti" as they say in Germany, and even though she found Africa way
different from anyplace she had been before, she just took it in stride as one more
place in the world she has learned about and made friends in. "Gotta go back there"
places for her are from Hawai'i to Cape Cod to Catalunya to Sénégal.

I just hope that she doesn't take only low-paying positions when she gets her degree,
because with her friends now spread from Europe to Asia to Africa to America to the
French Caribbean (her best friend while studying in Paris was from Martinique), her
visits to her friends are starting to get expensive for yours truly.