It was May Day in Leavenworth over Mother's Day weekend so I went with my mom's to see the parade and the May Pole dancing. Since I spent a lot of years growing up in Germany it was really fun to see the Maibaum there in Leavenworth. I've always felt strong ties to the German culture because of my growing up there and now since Scarlet's transplant, I feel a renewed and even stronger tie and love for Germany. If you don't know already, Scarlet's donor is a man from Germany. The whole time I was watching the dancing I felt really emotional because I am so grateful for him who gave so much to our family half a world away. I took several different videos of the dancing but this one was my favorite because it reminded me of one of the few family "vacations" we had ever taken growing up. I think I was around 10 yrs. old when we all went to Berchtesgaden, Germany. We took this train into a mountain to get to the salt mine, if you could call it that, it was more like a kiddie ride at a fair, but really old and no protective anything, like seatbelts or sides to keep you from falling out. I remember clinging to whoever was in front of me and being really scared, first of the dark and secondly of falling off. I can relate a lot to the people on the boat on Willie Wonka going down the river, it was dark and you could feel that there wasn't a lot of space and there would be flashes of light randomly through the tunnel into the mountain. So when you see the men crouching in their dance, they really had to crouch in those mines! When the train stopped though, and this is where it gets even more like Willie Wonka, the tour guide said you could lick the walls because it was a salt mine and the walls were of salt. I'm sure snozzberries tasted a lot better than those salt walls. Then we took this wooden raft over a small lake of salt water from there, it was really Harry Potter like. I really don't remember how we got out of the mountain. The whole experience was a little traumatizing but it was so amazing. Sorry, didn't mean to make this blog a flashback, but once I started I had to keep going. :) You understand.