It’s a Small World…Over the Rainbow
Sunday, August 3rd, 2008
I don’t usually just relate simple anecdotes, but this one is much too good to pass up. This little pleasantry belongs in the annals of Farmers Almanacs the world over. It all begins with Marty Brennaman. I had once noticed the odd juxtaposition of Marty when seated next to his frequent broadcast partner, the late Joe Nuxhall, in which Marty just looked awful-darn small – almost like a ventiloquist dummy on Joe’s lap. I commented on this to my co-worker Garry, who naturally took the next step of enlarging Joe even more, creating quite a funny photo in which Marty really did look like a puppet next to Joe.
The first thing that I thought about when I popped out of bed at 6am was that I wasn’t at home. The second thing was that…if I were at home, it would have been midnight. So I scraped myself out of bed, grabbed a shower, and prepared for the busy day ahead. The Mercure Porta Nigra in Trier, Germany did not have breakfast waiting for us, but it would be the last place in which we stayed that didn’t have a huge European-style buffet breakfast until our final two days in Europe. I stopped off at the lobby computer briefly on the way out and then headed to our car. 
It had been eight years since I had been on the west coast, but it had been even longer since I had seen Penn & Teller perform live, ten years having passed since I last saw them locally at the 
As I walked the ramp from the airplane to customs on the morning of Saturday, July 5, 2008, the first thought that entered my mind was that Germany must be a dunghole. The whole area had been ripped apart for construction and it looked like I had just entered a third-world country. As it happens, this was the only area of the country that made me feel this way. Of the eight European countries I visited, Germany was the nicest of all. Ahead of me were two weeks of traveling via planes, trains, and automobiles (as well as boats, taxis, buses, and subways) throughout the European continent. I had finally popped the pond after 36 years of remaining on the North American continent.