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A Good Friend Visits

Two things I love about where we live:  it's on the way to just about anywhere, and we can easily (and happily) accommodate anyone who is willing to stay the night.

Our friend, Doug Craddock, is an Englishman who lives in Italy with his Italian wife and their three kids.  We met them in Bitburg, Germany, and have been friends ever since.  In fact, Doug likes to remind us that he is the reigning Siedler world champion.  I recently noticed that Doug has been taking trips to the US, and with us living only four hours from New York City and New Jersey, I wondered why he didn't contact us.

When I shared this with John, John did what any self-respecting friend would do, and called him up.  You know, they haven't spoken in eight years, but John calls him like we still lived just down the road from each other.  Turns out, he was coming down I-80 from Chicago in a couple of days.  John insisted that we meet for breakfast.

Friday afternoon came around, and we hadn't heard from him.  John called again, and it turned out that a freak snowstorm had hit Chicago, and he and his salesman friend were leaving early.  They were just going to stay in a hotel 40 minutes from us.

Uh yeah, no they weren't.  Not if we Kennedys had anything to say about it.

So, with a couple hours to spare, we changed the sheets in the bedrooms, vacuumed a bit, Glo and I ran to the grocery store and waited.  I went to bed at midnight, but John stayed up until they arrived at 1:30 a.m.

Glo and I woke up the next morning, bright and early, to give Doug a hot (aka English) breakfast before he headed to NJ to catch a plane back to Italy.

Turns out, we didn't get up as early as we thought we did, because John and Doug were already out running.  Yes folks, yet another friend who has taken up running since we knew him in Germany.  In other words, nobody was running when we lived there, but since we've moved away, everybody runs.

We try not to take it personally.

It was a beautiful morning, so we sat on the deck and caught up over some delicious food and even better conversation.  It was only an hour or so, but it was just so nice to be together again.


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