A Short Visit to Leipzig, Germany
October 13-14, 2026
We are traveling again and, as usual, our starting point is Lopez Island, an 8 mile by 12 mile dusty rock in the Salish Sea between Vancouver Island and the continental mainland USA. Here, in October, the air seems cleaner, fresher, allowing the sun to beam in with an astonishing clarity, sparking up the dew drops, turning spider webs into geometric light shows. The sun is warm, the air is cool, and there's nearly nobody on the golf course to interrupt my struggling. The summer tourists have gone home. Why we are leaving this island during one of the best seasons to live here is a good question. The answer is complex and not completely explicable, but we have one: We're off to visit friends in Germany again. This is where it gets complicated because these friends are literal family. We've done this trip repeatedly so those of you following the blog will experience much of the deja-vu that we do. Everything changes, though. We never find much that continues unchanged and when we find that something that has remained so, we may be disappointed and fearful for the survival of western civilization. We shall endeavor to crack on and to report our perspectives in any case.
Our progress to Leipzig passes a number of phases which can be thusly identified:
Leave the house and set the alarm.
Drive to the ferry.Sail on ferry to the mainland.
Dine at the bar at Anthony's in Anacortes and watch Monday Night Football while I-5 rush hour traffic clears out a little.
Drive to south toward Seattle.
Take an unplanned detour through the Stillaguamish Tribe's commercial RV resort complex because CK took the wrong exit off I-5 in an attempt to find a gas station.
Find the correct exit and get gas.
Arrive at the hotel in SeaTac & get some sleep despite the night owls in the neighboring room binge watching ancient episodes of Dallas and Breaking Bad.
Day Two: Experience the ecstasy of a Hampton Inn breakfast without contracting something the doctor s don't know about yet. The chafing dish looks positively lukewarm and dangerous while a large plaque on the wall encourages us to pour their batter on the hot griddle provided for our convenience and then consume the inflated result thereof, coated with syrup from sealed plastic mini cups of course. All we can eat in the land of plenty! Help me.
Next: check out of the hotel and put the car in a Masterpark Garage for stupid amounts of cash.
Shuttle bus to the airport. Check in, drop off luggage.
Find the lounge because we have 2.5 hours before our flight. Nobody can accuse us of tardiness. Well, they can but they'd be incorrect.
Wait.
Time's up. Find the gate. The computers scan our faces again.
Board the plane. It's the neighbors again. In the pod seats to our left are two people traveling solo who want to chat, gossip, flirt, negotiate, confess, report life experiences, etc. at high speed. A crossword puzzle clue: "King and I" number by Julie Andrews, 15 letters. "Getting to Know You"It goes like this:
"I wouldn't call that life changing, but...I had no idea she was out of jail...I tried duck for the first time two weeks ago...I don't remembdr the last time I took a picture of my kids...My daughter works in HR and sometimes she just calls me from work...That's my natural hair, it's wavy and I can make it go really curvy....There's Derek, he's my oldest, a big Seahawks fan...Momma's a rocker. I do a lot.Oops, a Freudian Slip!"
All of this in their outdoor voices. We are impelled to find the headphones and discover the secrets of the Lufthansa on-board entertainment system. It is only a partial solution. I can still hear these chatty people next to us but thankfully it's an unintelligible garble made possible by tinny music delivered by these cheap headsets. It's about an 9.5-hour flight. Perhaps they will pass out.
We are served a meal which looks far better than it tastes. It tastes like hospital food, which to say cheerless and disturbingly practical. If practical were a flavor, it would be woven into the DNA of hospital food. And airplane food. Except the fruit and cheese plate on Alaska Air! This is worthy, somehow.
The internet connection is $35, not included in this pricey business class bunk. I'm unwilling to pay that much to keep up with the baseball playoffs or argue with a Russian bot on Facebook.The movie selection on this flight is dismal. I read some Bill Bryson on my Kindle instead. The neighbors don't run out of chat momentum until more than 4 tortured hours crawl by. Blessed unconsciousness silences them at last. The pilot announces that this is his final flight. He is retiring forthwith. Today is his birthday to top it off. My fear of flying is blunted knowing that his motivation for getting us to Frankfurt safely is at maximum.
On the screen I try "The Death of Robin Hood". Can't make it past the expository scenes. Too much gratuitous 13th century butchery by amazingly grimy individuals. Curiously, my tolerance for US football doesn't prepare me for this level of violence. I'll try the other end of the spectrum, a sugar-coated confection that calls itself "The Magic Faraway Tree". Struggling parents fall on hard times and their 3 children are forced to abandon their unhealthy addiction to social media and video games. Relocated to a rural life, the kids encounter a tribe of fairies and pixies. The rest is a tale spun of cotton candy with a caramel chaser where the kids deliver the fairies from evil and bring prosperity back to the parents. I was hoping for clever dialog but it's pretty much awful. Maybe it's terrific if you're 8.
At last we are on the ground in Frankfurt where we find that border check systems are different than we remember. At an electronic kiosk our passports, faces, and fingerprints are scanned. The machine tells us to go forth and speak to a border agent down the hall. Many folks did not use the kiosk. They wait in a long, slow queue. Our queue has a 3 minute wait. We're out of there in a whistle. Now, it’s a 1.25 mile walk to the baggage claim. I don’t think we’ll get the chance to learn these passport check systems since they change them every 18 months or so. And it is different if you enter the EU in Iceland or bounce out and back in as sometimes happens when we include the UK in our tour. We just don’t know what to expect any more.
Now we must find the train station that is attached to this airport. We have plenty of time: 3 hours until our train to Leipzig comes to scoop us up. It’s a good thing we have the time. We spent the best part of 30 minutes in search of the route to the proper train station. In Frankfurt, it turns out that there are two stations. One underneath Air Terminal 1 and one across the parkway which needs to accessed via a skybridge. The one under the terminal is for local trains. The one we want is the Deutsche Bahn station. We had to get the low down from a worker because the signs weren’t sending us to the right place. If we had been on a tight schedule, we probably would have missed a train. We have a long wait in Frankfurt during which we fail to have any adventures worthy of mention.
We find our train to Leipzig, a 4 hour glide along slick German rails. No clickity clak on these welded steel ribbons. Also, we have no adventures to report. We’re scarcely able to respond in any case since we have become transport zombies, feeling more like worn out luggage than anything human. Our propensity to doze is challenged by the vicious screams of a two year old 4 seats away who seems to be experiencing some soul-destroying jealousy caused by parental attention given to his sibling. These are some existential howls that succeed in wrecking our attempts to achieve a somnambulant state. Our zombified condition deepens. At about 5 pm we arrive in Leipzig and gratefully leave the vocal range of that toddler.
On the platform we are ambushed by Katherina, Wille, and Helena who were hiding behind a slab of signage. We are greeted with smiles, hugs, little bouquets of flowers, and fancy chocolate candy gifts. Of course, this is why we are here; to see this lovely crew. Helena is almost 13 and taller every time we visit, taller than her mom and soon she’ll be looking me eye to eye. It’s that teenage growth spurt and it’s in full tilt boogie for her. Wille is starting to get his, too. It’s amazing to watch them go through these changes. Plans are made to spend the afternoon and evening at their house tomorrow. Fun, games, and a nice meal. Katherina always goes way overboard with her hospitality for us.
Our evening is going to be short and consumed with physical collapse, we hope. We have our habitual first meal in Leipzig at Sardegna, an Italian joint next door to Nikolai Kirche in the town center. Yes, there are a couple of guys there we’ve seen for a dozen years and they recognize us. CK has pasta and salmon. I go for the giant prawns which come fully armor plated. After surgically removing their heads and shells, my plate looks like a bomb went off on it. Good stuff, though.
An after-dinner walk brings us around to the central plaza, a peek into Madler Passage to stroll past the bronzes of Faust and Mephistopheles taunting a student at Auerbach’s Keller. A few doors down is the Mephisto Bar, one of the coolest art nouveau joints in Europe except for one thing: they are a smoking lounge. I always drop in hoping that the management has changed and the smoking banned. No luck.
There’s time for an ice cream at the Milchbar Pinguin but then we’re out of gas for sure. We must call it a day. I think we’ve been in the same clothes for 30+ hours and we must be getting stinky. We’ll pick this up tomorrow.
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