From Cornfields to Castles, then Conifers

4/25/2025 – Note that this article has been edited for accuracy. You’ll know which part when you get to it. 🙂

Last year I promised to write about my mom’s life journeys. Really, this post could be about both of my parents, but since my overarching blog theme is the journeys of women, we’ll start with her. I interviewed her for this, and found out some things I didn’t know! Read or skim all the way for fun photos.

My mom, Vicki, was born in a small town in farm country, Nebraska. Harvard is surrounded by cornfields. She likes to say she graduated from Harvard (adding “High School” after letting people be impressed for a moment). Her ancestry is mostly German, English, and Scottish. Random genealogy note: we’re distantly related to the guy that invented Kool-Aid, and there is a Kool-Aid museum in Nebraska! There is a strong German heritage in Nebraska, too, as evidenced by the existence of a fast-food chain called Runza that specializes in German-inspired stuffed meat pockets. Bonus genealogy note: Mom’s Scottish ancestors came to the U.S. as a young couple who ran away because she was the daughter of aristocrats and he was the family gardener and they weren’t allowed to be together, or so the story goes. Anyway, with all the German heritage around there, Mom took German classes in high school.

Her early travels with family were to the nearby museums including the Pioneer Village (we went there once when we drove to Nebraska to visit family, and it reminds me of the Oregon Trail museums we have here in Oregon) and the state capitol building in Lincoln. I have her little souvenir binoculars she got at Pioneer Village when she was a kid. Mom was enthralled with the big city of Lincoln with its department stores complete with escalators and chocolate pie. She also got to see dinosaur fossils at the University of Nebraska (GBR!*).

When she got a little older, she ventured out farther across the state with church friends to Scotts Bluff and a church college in Indiana. She also went with her family to visit her much-older brother in Colorado. She loved the drive up into the mountains and watching airplanes take off at the airport. She let me have this souvenir booklet of Colorado pictures that her grandma must have given her!

She says she didn’t have big travel dreams at that age yet. However, her horizons were to soon get much bigger.

When she married my dad right after graduating high school, they soon enlisted in the army for a three-year tour. They listed Germany as their top choice of where to be stationed since Mom had studied German. Not only were they lucky to be stationed together at all, they were assigned to their top choice!

They were stationed at the American army base in Hanau, near Frankfurt, but lived off-base in the nearby town of Oberrodenbach. They had an upstairs apartment in a Germany lady’s home. Because of this and my mom’s high school German classes, she got really fluent while she lived there. Dad learned some while there but didn’t have the head start Mom had. Mom remembers the beautiful cobblestone streets in Oberrodenbach and how you could hear the noise of trucks driving on them from across town. She loved it.

General life in Germany included good friends at the American chapel and good food. Her favorite dishes were schnitzel, currywurst, and goulash suppe.

They traveled around Germany whenever they could. Mom’s favorite part of the country was Bavaria. There, they saw all three of Mad King Ludwig’s castles, including Neuschwanstein (I’ve been there!) and another one that had a huge grotto with boats in it. She also loved the mountain ski town of Garmish-Partenkirchen in the Bavarian Alps. She says it was just the cutest town. It’s the highest one in Germany. They saw the Zugspitze (the highest mountain in Germany/ the Bavarian Alps) but she didn’t get to ride the historical cogwheel train to the top. Another highlight was seeing the lighting of Heidelberg Castle, another one that I’ve been to. Mom says that when her parents went to Germany to visit her and Dad, they all went to the town of Eckertsweier to meet some of my grandparents’ relatives.

Being in the middle of a bunch of European countries, Mom and Dad got to travel to several of them. They went to Holland, Belgium, France, Austria, and Switzerland. Between those and Germany, Mom got to see castles, cathedrals, and sobering visits to concentration camps.

One of Mom’s favorite places outside Germany was Paris, France. She never got to go up the Eiffel Tower, but she loved seeing it anyway. She remembers eating crepes along the Seine River and watching people paint there. Her other favorite city outside Germany was Salzburg, Austria. There they signed up for the Sound of Music bus tour, where they could see many of the locations filmed in the movie.

Mom and Dad loved Germany, but Mom was pregnant with me at the end of their three-year commitment, so they decided to return to the U.S.A. However, they didn’t want to live in Nebraska. They (we! although I don’t remember it since I was a baby) stayed with family there for a few months while they prepped for a new life across the country. Two of my dad’s brothers had moved out west, and my parents decided to join them. They’d been to Oregon to visit before, and with all the forests and mountains, it looked like Germany to them (minus the castles, of course).

They drove across the country with a baby in the back seat. According to one story I was told as a youth, I wouldn’t stop crying for hours in the car. As I remember the story, they filled my baby bottle with wine, and I sacked out for the rest of the drive. That may explain some of my idiosyncrasies… (Note: after reading this, Mom pointed out that she only put a tiny bit of wine in my bottle of milk or formula or whatever. I pointed out that makes for a less exciting story. The version my 10-year-old self remembers is funnier, although if it really happened to someone, I admit it wouldn’t be funny. Please do not fill your baby’s bottle with wine!)

For many years, Mom’s main travels were with us to Nebraska to visit family, with occasional trips to Washington for Dad’s jobs. She finally made it to the top of something big: Seattle’s Space Needle! My parents didn’t have a lot of money for tourist traps, but that is the biggest thing I remember getting to do as a kid on a trip. Our trips to Nebraska were pretty epic, too. One time when we were young, Mom took my brother and me back there, and didn’t want to drive by herself, so she took us across the country by train. It was so much fun! Another time, Dad flew us there in a 4-seater airplane (he was a flight instructor at the time). Guess who was the copilot? Mom! Yup, she learned how to fly! Not everyone’s mom gets to do that.

Mom took a few trips on her own when us kids were older, too, especially after my parents divorced. She went to Kansas and to Texas on work trips and enjoyed watching the storms. That’s one thing she misses from Nebraska. Oregon gets most of our lightning storms in the mountains, so we don’t get to see them as much here in the Valley.

Mom remarried when I was in college. My stepdad, Darrell, had also lived in Germany when he was in the American military, albeit earlier than my parents. Mom and Darrell have not been able to go to Germany together, but they’ve made up for it by going to towns here in the Pacific Northwest that have been made to look German. This includes Mount Angel here in Oregon, which grew in numbers in the late 1800s with many immigrants from Bavaria and a group of monks from a town named Engelberg in Switzerland. The name Mount Angel is the English translation of Engelberg. The abbey the monks founded on the top of Lone Butte is still a place of peace and prayer today. Mom and Darrell have also made it to Leavenworth, Washington. Leavenworth was a dying timber town when its residents came together with a creative idea to save it: recreate it as a German-themed tourist town. With Washington state’s Cascade Mountains on one side of it, Mom and Darrell felt like they were in the Bavarian Alps! And of course ate bratwurst and did fun touristy things like the horse and carriage ride and old-time photos. Mom says the photographer was retiring the next day after her photo shoot, so I can legally post the photo here, which is great, because Mom couldn’t find any photos of her in Germany for me to post.

Before those trips, Mom finally made it to California for the first time. I think she and Darrell went there for their honeymoon. They drove down the coast a ways and enjoyed the Redwoods, beach, and Victorian architecture in Eureka before driving east over the mountains to the Mt. Shasta area and heading home on I-5.

Mom also made it to Canada with Darrell! They went with my aunt and uncle to Vancouver, B.C. to see the sights several years ago. Mom is terrified of heights, but she walked across a canyon on the Capilano Suspension Bridge! I was so proud of her when she told me that.

They’ve taken other trips, too, like a road trip across the country to Amish country in the Midwest and short camping trips in their RV. But lately they’ve slowed down to work on their property (they live on 9 acres in the country west of Eugene) and spend time with people they care about. My stepkids love going out there to visit “Grandma Vicki” and run around the property with my brother, “Uncle Ben.”

Mom and I have gone on day trips around Oregon in recent years, like to the tulip fields near Woodburn and fun places in the mountains like Newberry Crater National Monument. But I’ve been wanting for years to take her somewhere really neat, like San Francisco or Victoria, B.C. I’m not sure what the future holds, but if nothing else, there’s always hanging out in my hometown. She raised us in Eugene, Oregon, and there’s nowhere like it, with miles of hiking trails in the woods at the edge of the city.

*GBR = Go Big Red, what Nebraskans cheer at sports events (at least American football games)