May 8, 2020 – Our RV Adventures

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May 8, 2020 Uncategorized

Würzburg and It All Came Out OK In The End . . .

Heard back from DakotaPost, our SD mailing service, and our Stimulus Checks are on the way down here via Priority Mail. Yah!

Is this the end of Buffets and Cafeterias?

Souplantation and Sweet Tomatoes, a chain of 97 locations nationwide has announced that they’re shutting down permanently, as they see no way forward in the WuFlu environment.

And I would imagine cafeterias like Luby’s and Piccadilly’s are in the same boat. And I know Ryan’s was already on the ropes as well as Home Town Buffet and Old Country Buffet, also. So can Golden Corral be far behind?

The problem is that these places can’t even afford to open with only a 25% occupancy requirement, or probably not even at 50%. They depend on moving a lot of people through at a steady pace, otherwise they can’t even recoup their costs on the food that they’re putting out.

Jan and I are worried about our local favorite Yummy Yummy. The sign on their door says that they’re closed temporarily and will reopen soon, but I don’t see how until the occupancy % is pretty much back to 100. Crossing our fingers.

Oh, on a separate note, Logan Roadhouse has also filed for bankruptcy, but again they were already having troubles pre-WuFlu.

On a personal note, a few weeks ago after our annual physicals, our doctor gave us both ColoGuard tests to take and send in. Well, last week they came back, with Jan’s coming out negative, but mine came back positive.

Rut Roh!

The last time I had a colonoscopy was December 2007 while I still working full-time and had insurance. Everything was fine, and in fact the doctor was surprised that I had absolutely no polyps whatsoever, especially since I had never had any removed before.

I told him I figured it was all the extremely hot stuff I ate, and that it just cauterized everything down there. He laughed and said, “Could be”.

Reading up on the Colo Guard test, I found in the fine print that it has 13% false positive rate. This from a test that costs $650. So as a double-check, I got a FIT test from the drugstore to check for blood. And it came up negative.

The Colo Guard test actually checks for suspicious DNA that might indicate cancerous polyps, while the FIT just checks for bleeding polyps that might be cancerous.

My doctor has given me a FIT test every other year for a while now and it’s always come back negative too.

So setting up the appointment last week, yesterday was Prep Day for today. And I must say they’ve really improved the whole prep thing. Last time it was a gallon of really foul tasting, chalky liquid that almost made you gag when you drank it. In fact the prep was much worse than the actual colonoscopy.

But this time it was really easy. The SuPrep kit came with two 6oz bottles of liquid and 16oz plastic cup. At 5pm yesterday, I dumped one of the bottles into the cup, topped it up to 16oz with Lipton’s Diet Green Tea and drank it down.

It was a clear liquid with a vague cherry flavor, and mixed with the Green Tea, it was very palatable. Then within the next hour I had to drink two more 16oz drinks.

The only thing that bothered me was the cost of the SuPrep kit. It was $105! And it was just a mixture of sodium sulfate, potassium sulfate, and magnesium sulfate. Now I can buy a pound of food grade sodium sulfate on Amazon for $10, as well as the potassium sulfate (potash), and magnesium sulfate (Epsom salts). So for about $30 I could enough of this to make about a hundred kits.

Guess that little plastic cup must be really expensive.

Then at 9pm I had to do it all over again. And all I can say, boy, this stuff will clean you out quick.

I was told that I needed be there at 11:30 for the 12:30 procedure. And for once they were right on time.

After I was prepped in Pre-Op, inserting the I.V., blood pressure cuff, pulse oximeter, etc., I was rolled into the endoscopy suite at 12:21 and woke up back in my Pre-Op room at 12:45pm. Wow, that was quick. I didn’t even remember dozing off.

And it seems that it was quick because once again I had absolutely no polyps, just a little bit of diverticulosis on one side that’s never caused me any problems.

So I guess I’m one of the lucky 13% of false positives.

In other words, it all came out OK in the end.

BTW you can thank Jan for the fact that I didn’t post the color pictures I was given of the inside of my colon.

Thought For The Day:

Once you know what’s up, be smart and play dumb.

One Year Ago Today: We were in Würzburg, Germany

Würzburg

Würzburg, Germany 5/8/2019

Our ship docked at Würzburg at 7am after traveling all night from Bamberg, but we got to rest up since our Würzburg Residenz and Walking Tour didn’t start until 1pm. So we had plenty of time for a leisurely breakfast and a nice lunch with our friends before we headed for the buses.

Our first stop was, of course, the Würzburg Residenz.

Originally the Prince-Bishops of Würzburg resided in the Marienberg Fortress located on a hill overlooking the Main River and the city.

Note the vertically-planted vineyards. We saw vines planted like this all over Europe, but they’re apparently being phased out due to government safely regs. It seems that the workers slipping and rolling all the way to the bottom is a real problem. So now they’re moving to terracing.

But the Prince-Bishops thought that the Fortress was just too small to measure up to their exalted position. This is what they thought was too dinky for them.

So in 1720 construction was started on the Residenz, but like a lot of these projects, it dragged on through several different rulers, and it took 24 years to finish the exterior buildings, and then another 36 years to finish off the interiors in 1780..

But it was worth it as you can see from these exterior shots.

And what it looks like from the road, out over the gardens.

Unfortunately, like many of these places, the Residenz had a ‘no photos’ rule. Now, of course, I can understand a ‘no flash’ rule, but really, why no photos at all?

And as usual, somebody’s taking photos because they’re all over the Internet, so you get to see some of those. And the place is really something.

We spent a couple of hours touring the palace, and as happened in Nuremberg, when we came out, it had gotten much colder and was now sprinkling. None of which was forecast. Nothing new, of course.

We started the Walking part of the tour, heading into town, about a 15 minute walk, first checking out the Old Stone Bridge.

The first bridge here was built in 1120 A.D., but was destroyed in a flood in1342. It was rebuilt, and, until 1885, was the only to get to Wurzburg from across the river.

Of course, when it was built, it was a pedestrian bridge, and still is.

As we walked around we came across a number of these burled trees.

I don’t know what the story is on these, but there’s nothing on the Internet about them.But they were all over the place.

Our next stop was at St. Michael’s Church.

Like many churches over here, there have been a series of churches here, with the first one dating to 1221 A.D.

This incarnation dates from 1763, a veritable youngster in this area.

As this point, as evidenced from the raindrops on the photo above, and the fact that it was getting even colder, we decided to end our participation on the walking tour and headed back to the bus. And so did a lot of others.

One last fact is that in 1895, William Roentgen, working in his lab in Wurzburg, discovered X-Rays, and in 1901 was awarded the very first Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery.

The same one that Sheldon and Amy won.

Later at about 7pm, warmer and drier, and with a nap under our belts, we met our friends for dinner.

We both started off with the Ginger Carrot Soup,