Thursday, February 26, 2015

Presidents Weekend

During winter season for sports, Sam has wrestled.

He turned out to be not half bad at it, claiming second place for his weight group on the team even though he has never wrestled before.  He was expected to go to the European championships, both because of who he would face at sectionals and because of his record of wins and losses.  Therefore, we planned nothing.  The week before Sectionals, he decided it was time to take on his dad and his dad, being the man that he is, decided not to go to easy on him.  Development: strained back and neck muscles, Result: he actually lost to the opponent that he had always beat before.  Now there were some extra problems in this match.  The scoring was not the best and when the coach went up to complain, the ref reviewed the scores written down and said, yes, there should have been a tie between the two and they should have gone to overtime, but he already declared the other guy the winner and he was moving on.  Also, when they replayed the match, the ref had forgotten to give Sam one point, therefore, Sam should have actually won.  Either way, he was given a good chance at a wild card, because of his record.  He came home a couple days later and said they had given him the wild card, but then decided that they had too many wild cards and cut two of them, him being one.  The next day he came home late.  He said at the beginning of the day they told him that one guy dropped out and so he was back in.  When he showed up for practice, they told him the guy was back in and Sam was out, again.  The poor kid- in, out, in, out!  It was horrible!  Needless to say, he stayed out and didn't get to go, but the team brought home the big win for the year!  European Champions!

Instead we had our sick Brother in law come down and have fun with us at Heidelberg Castle.

 They had an old Pharmacy museum in the castle as well- this is an Enema
 This is a mold for suppositories.

 Big wine barrel
 The biggest wine barrel- this is how the town paid it's taxes.

 Part of the turret fallen down.



On a beautiful walk to find the 7 old mills.
 We only had time for 2.







And to a Fasching parade.  
It got so cold we couldn't feel our toes by the end of this very long and very witch heavy parade.









They did all kinds of tricks like taking the laces out of people's shoes, taking their shoes, stealing the kids and carting them away- that happened to one of our group,  (They finally let them go about 2 or 3 blocks away (he was 7!)) and throwing lots of confetti.  Every once in a while they threw candy too.  There wasn't as much candy as I remember.  We left a little early and headed towards the car, which was along the parade, so we ended up seeing the whole thing.  We also bought some of the special Fasching  donut, the Faschingskrapfen.  It tasted like a 3 day old rectangular donut- which is very well might have been and why it was on super sale!  Overall a fun Presidents day weekend.