Time stood still for three weeks. It was so dense like a rich chocolate cake, filled with nuts and caramel and everything good. And today we said goodbye to mom and dad. We hugged tightly at the Cluj airport, we held back our tears and smiled a thousand smiles in a discreet yet heavy love.
Conrad woke up at 6:30 AM to bake pretzels for mom and dad. 7:30 rolled in and the coffee was hot, and the pretzels were steaming. Conrad truly knows how to express his love and he knows all the shortcuts to my heart as well as his parents’ hearts.
We enjoyed a quiet morning together, packing and weighing the last time the two suitcases and then we took a walk up the hill. We smelled the drying hey, the flowers and the wind. It’s so quiet on Sunday morning, except you can still hear the birds. It was already warm at 9 AM, but we took a seat at the top, and we prayed a braided prayer. We tasted heaven together. We were doing that just there at the top of some anonymous hill in Romania, at the outskirts of Cluj, in a village.
These past three weeks we felt God’s presence and saw his beauty taken in through all our senses, through picturesque landscapes, delicious dairy free ice-cream, warm winds and clear blue waters. In Croatia we had our coffee in our room, 5 meters away from the shore, listening to the waves, church bells, smelling the breeze of the Adriatic sea. We saw hundreds of miles of rocky hills, and old simple houses made of stone.
In Vienna and every city for that matter, we entered tens of churches and cathedrals that were so inviting with their stone coolness, the smell of incense, the beautiful timeless art and a nearly palpable silence. We purposefully entered every specialty coffee shop and bookstore for our men’s joy and pleasure.
Today we said goodbye…
And thus we traveled 2800 km by car through 6 countries in Europe. And it was simply wonderful, heat, tiredness and all.