Wedding Anniversaries in Europe # 2 of 2

For our 38th anniversary in 1989, parking was impossible. The hotel doorman told a couple of taxis drivers to move, then let us park the RV right in front of the Marriott Hotel in Athens, Greece. From our dining table we could see the camper parked in front of the hotel, but of much more interest, we could see the Parthenon on the top of the Acropolis.

The Parthenon, as with many of these old buildings, was partially covered with scaffolding, and looks like it could be under construction, or under renovation. We asked the waiter when he last visited the Parthenon. He laughed and said as a school child he was bussed to the Acropolis one day, the one and only time he has been there. Isn’t that a shame.

For our 44th wedding anniversary in 1995, I reminded Emmy that our unbroken rule of eating in a new and different restaurant each anniversary, one neither of us had ever been to before, precluded eating at McDonald’s in the Strasbourg, France, Shopping Mall. Well, we did snack there one year.

There are hundreds of beautiful sights to see, and outdoor places to buy food, so I didn’t want to go inside a building unless it was the Strasbourg Cathedral, that’s special, but no restaurant building. Even a “new” McDonald’s wouldn’t qualify for an Anniversary dinner, so we celebrated in the “Strasbourg Cafeteria.” For us that meant getting a bite here and a bite there as we walked the streets of this beautiful city. We stopped in an Algerian bakery to buy a loaf of their special bread, and didn’t even need butter to enjoy that course of our banquet. It was all topped off with an ice cream cone as desert.

It wasn’t our Anniversary, but on Sunday December the 4th, 1988, a couple dozen people gathered at the Post Restaurant in Mettlach, Germany, for the 49th wedding anniversary of Cousin Hugo and Maria, and Cousin Fina and Köbus. Unbeknownst to the other couple, they were married on the very same day in 1939, just as the war was starting. Due to the war and imprisonment in various prisoner of war camps, several years passed before they could celebrate the occasion together.

This year Köbus had been in the hospital for about a week, so Josef went to the hospital and checked him out for a couple of hours for the party. We were glad we had stayed for this special day in 1988. Cousin Fina died in 1989, just before their 50th anniversary.