From Puerto Sherry we flew via Madrid to Luxembourg for the week while the boat is on the hard getting new sail drives installed. My brother Mark met us at the airport at 11.00 pm and we stayed up till 2 ish sampling his beers and catching up with him and Annabelle and daughter Ella. Oscar, my nephew who sailed with us from Darwin to South Africa, is at boarding school in Melbourne so unfortunately we missed him. Mark’s beer brewing business is doing well and he has side stepped into canning and has his own mobile canning and labelling machine which he contracts out to various breweries around Europe. He and his off sider Mark travel around operating it. We had fun checking out the machine and doing a little more sampling at his shed.
We drove around Luxembourg a bit for Pete to see as it was his first visit here and called in to the American War Cemetery for the US soldiers who died liberating Luxembourg. Very moving and a frightful reminder of what a waste of lives there was – and this only a small corner of the war. General Patton is buried there, who, interestingly didn’t die on the field but as a result of a car accident after the war had finished in Dec 45 coming back from a pheasant shoot. The few photos I took of Annabelle and Ella turned out blurry but there are plenty of beer shed shots. We met Annabelle’s brother David who for the last 25 years I have missed meeting by a week here or a day there at various places in the world.
