Day 156-road trip to Mardorf

Saying good-bye to Hanspeter, Julia, and Martina.

   June 8-Today we were prototypical Americans: we drove and drove and drove.  Actually, to be fair, Europeans tend to do the same thing when they visit the States, but whenever they see Americans come over here and then drive all over, they roll their eyes.  In any event, we met the Zinks for breakfast at a bakery and then Hape, Dad, and I took public transportation over to Stachus to pick up the second rental car.  Turns out, we were supposed to have our passports to do so, and neither of us did, so Hape went back to the hotel, our wives gave him the passports, he came back over, and we finally got the car rented.  Whew! 
   After all of that, though, we did not get out of Munich until it was nearly noon, and we had over 400 miles to go.  Thankfully, the weather was good and we hit only one traffic jam at a construction site a short distance north of Munich.  Since we were on the legendary German Autobahn, this means that we made good time, cruising along at 80-100 mph.  Along the way, Joslyn pulled out a loose tooth, so we hoped that the Germans had a tooth fairy as well! 
   We arrived in Mardorf, which is about 30 miles west of Hannover, around 8:30 in the evening.  This is where Elisabeth Peters lives.  She is the widow of Horst Peters, who was my Mom’s second cousin.  Mom’s grandfather, Ernst, emigrated from Westphalia in the early 1890s and his younger brother, who was Horst’s grandfather, was killed early in World War I.  The two families lost contact at the end of World War II, but we made contact again in 1992, while I was over here studying in Regensburg. 
   My family visited me and we went to the town from which Ernst emigrated.  We visited the local government office and found an address where Peters still lived.  When we got there, a woman came out of the house and told us that we were probably not related and sent us to another house, where we could get more information.  The house turned out to belong to a cousin of my grandmother’s.  The cousin had just fallen ill and ended up dying a couple days later, so we never got to meet her.  She was told that we had visited and it made her very happy since she had related many times to her kids and nieces and nephews that two uncles of hers had emigrated to the U.S. and we were finally the proof that she had been correct.  As for the woman at the first address, she was married to Sigfried Peters who turned out to be my mother’s second cousin as well. 
   My family and I continued on our whirlwind tour of Europe and they flew back to the States and then Horst contacted me a few weeks later and invited me up to visit him and the relatives we had met earlier.  Since then, the family from Germany has visited us in the U.S. a couple times and various family members of mine have visited them as well.  Elisabeth was very happy to have us over.  Gertrud, a cousin of Horst’s, was also at the house to see us.  She lives a half block down the road.  Mom and Dad stayed at Elisabeth’s while we all stayed next door in the vacation apartment at Edith’s, who is Horst’s sister.  In all of the hubbub, Joslyn forgot to put her tooth under her pillow.