There’s this horrible song titled “Back to the Start” by Michael Schulte that has been following me since I arrived in Berlin and heard it for the first time. I tried ignoring its cloyingly formulaic jingle, not wanting to gain a clue about its lyrical content, but here I am on my last full day in Frankfurt, and just as it happened on every other day here, the song wafts out of the kitchen at the Engelhardts’ and into my ear to excite the worm that lives there. At that moment, I decided this was definitely the anthem of this German summer and went to the kitchen with trusty Google in tow and asked it to identify the song I didn’t want to know. Now I know the lyrics, and I resent it even more for its intentional sucking in people in need of nostalgia that dips into feelings of a lost childhood. Be that as it may, I can no longer ignore this musical trainwreck, and so by putting it front and center, I’ll forever be able to relive those mornings in cafes and at the Engelhardts when my cringe factor was in full tilt.

While I’m here, I shouldn’t forget to remind myself of the song that now identifies our days in Croatia, where we first heard Nera performing “Centar svita.” Well, that’s our “city” song, while in the country, it would have to be the Haris Džinović anthem, “Muštuluk.”

Enough of that, and onto the photo above. The Engelhardt’s are the official Guinness World Record holders of most liquid bath soaps ever collected in one place. While they now have enough soap to wash 100 people every day for 1,000 years their collection shows no signs of slowing down. Turns out that the Yves Rocher Grapefruit & Thyme Shower Gel might be my all-time favorite soap scent, and it only took me trying out a few dozen soap scents while I showered this morning to learn that.

Down in the basement the Engelhardt’s are still building their collection of jams and jellies to qualify with the Guinness committee as being the most diverse on earth. So you might be able to read some of the labels I zoomed in tight for this view of a mere 2% of the current collection where you’ll find cinnamon-cherry plum, pumpkin-coconut, apple-medlar (like, what the heck is medlar in the first place?), blueberry-coriander (who thought that one up?), and others you may never believe.

Upstairs for breakfast with the most awesome German Vollkornbrötchen served up with a gaggle of jam flavors, including lilac, dandelion jelly, and a concoction direct from Klaus, who created an amazing apricot-vanilla jam. The pièce de résistance, though, had to be the mind-blowing strawberry with mint and black pepper. What the hell, America? I go into our mega grocery stores, and I’m offered 100 different brands of grape and strawberry, a couple of raspberry variations, and the god-awful creation known as Goober, which puts peanut butter and grape jelly in the same jar.

You know that wish of mine to move slower and how I romanticize the speed of turtles and snails? Well, Jutta moves at a speed somewhere between the two, and I have to share a mea culpa here that I, in fact, do NOT want to move at those barely visible speeds where observers can’t be certain if the person is even moving anymore. My legs start to cramp, trying not to appear to be running ahead while I maintain her cadence so we can walk along together. Caroline and I left Heddernheim relatively early so we could fetch my mother-in-law and drag her out for lunch.

We took all of those trains to get to our destination, all of them.

I stood there waiting to frame this photo of Caroline walking with her mother, and finally, after about 45 minutes, the magic started to happen, and I had my shot. Now I’m nearing starvation, and my hallucinations are suggesting it might have been days since I last ate.

Our lunch was at the Central Grill right behind me here at the corners of Münchenerstrasse and Weserstrasse in the heart of the city. On Friday night, after landing in Frankfurt, we visited this place in need of some southern European cooking, and while I loved my meal, they were out of roasted lamb, so I settled on the lamb shank. My bet was that they’d have the roasted lamb today, and I wasn’t disappointed. The funny thing was that all three of us had the roasted lamb followed by a strong Turkish coffee before taking off for dessert.

Heading back from whence we came.

We waited for the U5 to take us back into our old neighborhood, but that story has been written about nearly a dozen times here on the blog of JohnWise.com.

This is becoming a bit of a tradition where Caroline poses with some giant plastic food items we spot along the road.

Our old neighborhood has been gentrified by hipsters who overtook the place. They moved in, started having babies, trendy restaurants followed them in, and now you have to be nearly rich to live here but it’s still a place of fond memories.

Klaus and Stephanie rode their bikes over here to meet us on this beautiful day so all of us could be together for at least a short while during this visit. Oh, and we’re at Eis Christina for our favorite Spaghetti Ice Cream in the world.

One more photo for the road before Caroline and I accompany Jutta back to her apartment.

Inclusiveness is on full public display when even the streetlights embrace the diversity that is thriving in Frankfurt.

With this being our last full day in Europe, we need to absorb as much of the city as we can so we opted to walk nearly all the way back to Heddernheim. Along the way, we even passed the house where Anne Frank spent her first years.

Why we never really learned about the green belts that trace through the city when we lived here will remain one of life’s great mysteries to me.

Klaus has been toiling in the kitchen to prepare this exquisite home-cooked meal. I must admit that Caroline and I are a bit embarrassed by the incredible hospitality offered us by the Engelhardt’s. We arrive, they give us a room upstairs, supply us with breakfast, turn over a key to the front door, and all of that for guests who are rarely here as we are out visiting our elderly family members or old friends for the majority of our time in Frankfurt. So I’m happy that towards the end of our vacations in Europe, we always seem to have a couple of days where we share each other’s company a bit more and close on a great note.