Hi Ho-Hi Ho Off to Germany I Go

I was able to have a lot of fun experiences while my husband was stationed in Germany many years ago. Christi and I traveled to be with him when she was two months old and the ban had been lifted for dependents to travel over from the USA. You see the Berlin Wall had just gone up and the travel to Germany for dependents to live was very limited. If I had to go over there I really wanted to live in a little house like Heidi’s in the novels. Really. You know the houses where the people lived upstairs and down stairs, in the barn, is where the animals were. I wrote this request to my husband who thought I had lost my mind. Now that I am a little more mature I can imagine that the smell would have been ever so delightful. Can you imagine waking up with morning sickness to that smell, yuk, yuk!


Danny made sure that I had a blessing before Christi and I left and his Uncle Wayne came up from San Jose to do that. The plane trip over was so frightening for me. Christi and I left from San Francisco and when I hugged my parents goodbye I hung on to them for dear life because I really felt in my heart that the plane would drop out of the sky and I would never see them again. I was 19 and had never flown in my life. Or done anything else much up to that point except to live in Amarillo, Texas.

The plane was huge and the stewardesses were very nice. Christi looked so cute in her darling little outfit that my friend Linda Hunter had given her. Linda worked in the hair salon at Joseph Magnin’s in Sacramento and had gotten it there. She had also done my hair up in a funny little style that I somehow thought was cute. My now dyed,  dark brown hair (to match Christi’s) was swept up from the back up to my bangs with a little swirl on each side that looked a little like a doughnut. Very adorable, very. My hair had been blonde all through the time I had dated Danny in high school and our early married days, you know like Sandra Dee’s,  and now I was going to show up in Germany looking like a funny replica of my former blonde self with a doughnut hair do.


Christi had been started on solids early because she had a huge appetite and the doctor had me giving her rice cereal and applesauce since she was four weeks old. Once the plane went up in the air the force of whatever caused her to potty all over everything she had on. What a horrible mess. Thankfully she smelled like applesauce, but what a mess she was. I had brought one change of clothes for her, (great planning on my part) her red and white Christmas jammies. I had to clean her all up and get her dressed in that tiny little bathroom on the plane. Fun, very fun. We landed  in Montreal and had to deplane because the plane had broke down, wonderful, wonderful a broken down plane well at least we landed safely. I put Christi’s cute little bunting on her and got ready to get off of the plane. A German women traveling on the plane got a wool blanket from the stewardess and told me I would kill my baby getting off the plane in the freezing, snowing weather outside because we had to walk down those stairs to the ground and not into the terminal. You know like you have seen on the news when Jackie O walked down the long flight of stair off of the huge airplane. Like that. So the German lady was right, it was very cold outside. They bussed us to a hotel and gave me a room because I had a little baby. Everyone else went to the little pub that the hotel had. Not me, I sat in my room on the bed all alone, except for Christi. I thought they would call us right away to get back on the plane so I was afraid to do anything much but nurse Christi and wait.


Love,Grammy T.