Last week Friday, without warning, our internet went out. Despite calls & reassurances that it would be fixed soon, it turned out to be an outage of a week. A WEEK! I cannot begin to tell you how frustrating it is to work off a hotspot. Especially when I have work & the three young adults in the house have college zoom classes.

Luckily it appears my cousin has a radar for trouble. Early Saturday morning I got the first in series of texts & calls. What was I doing? Um. I’m a whole country away. What did it matter? Well. Turns out. He was tired off all the things & needed a break. They were wanting to swing by for a visit on the way to an Airbnb in the Alps. Okay! Awesome! Fantastic timing. Because. This is my cousin that loves games & photography as much as I do. With no internet, this was the perfect weekend for him to visit.

Not only did I not have internet, but our trees are at the prime of their Fall glory. Not just their prime, but truly the most spectacular they’ve been in years. It is insanely beautiful here. It’s like nature knows we all need something good in 2020. The Fall colors are beyond good, they are phenomenal!

I took Marco & Rainer to my two favorite haunts, the monastery in Bebenhausen (this deserves it’s own post) and the Lichtenstein castle (in Germany, not Liechtenstein the country). We went at a nice slow pace, my kind of pace, meandering the grounds, taking pictures, enjoying the Fall colors and our time together.

I know I had no internet, and that was truly awful, but being outside? Showing off the best of my neighborhood? With family? In Fall? It was my bestest weekend during COVID yet.