It Kept My Story -- Cochem, Germany

We left for Germany Wednesday morning at about half nine. Between episodes of being knackered and being more knackered the night before, I'd done a bit of smart traveler google searching.

"Cute towns in Germany" being the most productive phrase.

So I entered all the cute towns from my "cute town" google search into google maps and tried to see if any happened to pop up on the way to Billie's. Lo and behold, Cochem popped up about an hour and a half away from our final destination.

"Wanna get a cappuccino at Cochem?" I asked my hot Dutch friend.

"Sure, why not?" she agreed.

We drove for three and a half hours through pancake Holland and slightly hilly Germany. Sometimes I woke up from my half-asleep car nap (I can never fall all the way asleep in cars) and saw that we were passing signs for towns like, 'Gouda' and 'Oosterhout' and 'Hoogstraten' and I laughed myself back to half-asleep.

New life goal: live in a town called 'Gouda'. Or 'Edam'. Baha... 

But Cochem was pretty nice too. Even if its name wasn't as exciting as Hoogstraten.

 

There were cats outside of our cafe, so we had good feelings about its potential to have good cappuccinos... (also, we had to pee, so we kind of charged into the first cafe we saw and then blamed the cats for our poor decision)

Never trust happy cats. They do not mean good cappuccinos. They mean cappuccinos that taste like acidic dirt.

 However, the quaintness of the town itself more than compensated for its acidic cappuccinos.

I'm not exactly sure what's happening with this statue, but I feel like the goat got the bad end of the bargain.

We got quite lost on the way back to our car and ended up seeing a bit more of the town than we would have liked. Then the oil light started blinking and Maud did her Dutch version of panicking.

Which looks like my version of being slightly confused/pissed off.

"How come my dad didn't tell me the car needed oil? He always checks the oil."

"Can we stop and top up? They should have oil at gas stations..."

"Yeah, but I don't know where to go in Germany."

"Do you think we can make it all the way to Billie's? Then she can tell you where to go and we can take it in tomorrow."

"An hour and a half... I'm not sure."

The orange light glared at us. Menacingly. Maud swore.

"I don't even know how to put the oil in. Do you?"

"No," I hated myself for being the stereotypical helpless woman. "But I bet you could get the people working at the gas station to help us."

"F*ck, man. I'm worried."

"Okay, let's stop here," I gestured towards a large gas station a couple hundred meters down the road. "For peace of mind."

Maud's English is impeccable, but Maud's German isn't exactly perfect. However, she did manage to convince a cute, blushing German chap to help us with the oil. I assumed that she'd go in there, buy the cheapest bottle of oil, and they would show her where to put it. However, topping up the car ended up being far more complicated than either of us had guessed, as we didn't know the type of oil the car needed and the car's manual was in Dutch (so our blushing German couldn't help much). So a good twenty minutes (and many blushes) later, we were back on the autobahn and heading towards Billie's.

"We wouldn't have made it to Billie's," Maud told me as we sped along. "The guy said that once the light comes on, you don't have a lot of time."

"Well, it's a good thing we stopped."

"I'll say. Can you imagine if I'd blown up the engine of my parents' car while they're on vacation?"

"It's a really good thing we stopped."

Julia and Billie weren't at the farmhouse when we arrived, but a Dutch volunteer from Portugal and a French volunteer greeted us in the living room.

Old farmhouses make me happy. Dog hair, cat hair, alpaca hair, lumpy couches covered with pillows and blankets and all aforementioned hair --

mmm.... this feels like a home. 

The more I travel, the more I notice the difference between homes and houses. Homes have personality. They don't necessarily have to be messy or cluttered, but they have to be lived in (for me to feel at home, anyway).  Homes have stained cookbooks and half-empty spice jars and chipped mugs. Homes have framed paintings and photos of family on the walls. 

Billie framed my alpaca postcard and had it on her wall.

Homes have stories. They're like cast iron skillets and can remember what you cooked for dinner last week.

Billie has the nicest home. And I love that it kept my story from last October.