Yesterday Helma and I went to Lackawanna State Park, to the fishing hole where she and Hermann spent many an hour “aggravating the fish” (as she puts it).
“You know what fishing is all about? The jerk on one end waits for a jerk on the other end.”
The Lackawanna State Park photos will take a while to process and upload on dialup, so I’ll skip directly to cameraphone shots from today at The Alpine.
The Alpine Inc. in Honesdale is a Wurst & Meat House and Restaurant in the Alpine Plaza, a complex that also houses their own meat processing facilities and the German American Club. I’d never been there before and I don’t think David had, either, even though we’d flown over it countless times; it isn’t far from Cherry Ridge Airport, where we hangared the Tri-Pacer. We drove through the village of Hawley and it sparked a memory or two of a time when David and I were famished after flying and were on a mission in Hawley to find a place to eat.
Helma and Hermann had been frequenting The Alpine since the time they opened in 1977, and we made a trip out there today for old times’ sake. The restaurant and gift shop are decorated in Bavarian style, and the place is crammed with products from Germany — not just food, but music, games, magazines, books, knickknacks and trinkets aplenty.
I dragged Helma into the restaurant even when she wasn’t hungry, and she had lentil soup while I had the goulash soup and the sausage sampler, followed by a bar of marzipan I purchased in the deli.
I’m a fan of marzipan, especially since 2002 when Iris arranged for a marzipan cake for my birthday after an exam. I’ll never forget that — I handed in my papers and ran out of SFU Harbour Centre, my brain befuddled from three hours of intense writing. I was greeted by three Germans sitting in my car singing the birthday song with a bunch of flowers and a marzipan cake (flown in from Lubeck that day with Kai) topped with a lit candle. That was great!
Helma offered to make me some sandwiches from the wurst she bought today at The Alpine and that set off a stream of puns:
“The best of the wurst!”
“For better or for wurst!”
“It couldn’t get any wurst!”
David was the Punster Extraordinaire, he would’ve gone to town with the wurst theme! Helma ate David’s favourite — liverwurst — while I preferred Hermann’s Mettwurst. For dessert we ate a couple of Hermann’s favourite marzipan rolls.
50,000 calories later, we raised our glasses of Hermann’s Jim Beam bourbon and coke and toasted our husbands with an old German expression:
“Auf das unsere Kinder lange Haelse kriegen!” (That our children get long legs!)
Technorati tags: Honesdale, Pennsylvania, The Alpine, German, marzipan, cameraphone, Nokia 6682
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