Day 3: Breakfast, Bible and Biking

When daylight showed up on Friday for real, it was a beautiful sunny day. Both of the Guziks' grown children are now back in California and they graciously made up one of their rooms for us. Here's the view from out of our window.

They also made us a wonderful breakfast before Inga-Lill took us over to Calvary Chapel Siegen to visit with the pastor there, Nick Long.

Nick is a musician (Chet Atkins' nephew) who came to Germany twenty years ago from Seattle Washington to begin a ministry aimed at young people. His church, Calvary Chapel Siegen, has a beautiful new sanctuary and a large building, with offices and classrooms where the Bible College holds its class meetings. The classrooms are in the white building on the left.

The church also has a bookstore and coffee-bar next door. (That's Ben Vizcarra, who picked us up from the airport, out in front). The whole congregation can meet for food and fellowship after the worship services. Because so many folks stay around between the multiple services, the parking lot has to be especially big.

The @Home Factory

Next door to the church, CC Siegen has purchased a huge warehouse that they want to use for various outreach purposes. The long-term plan is to create an indoor skate park, since Siegen is really rainy which makes the outdoor city skate park across from the church less than idea. (We couldn't tell about the rainy part from our stay; it's been beautiful every day).

Rather than starting with the skate park, though, the church began with a huge second-hand store, called the @Home Factory. Germany doesn't have many other large second-hand stores (like Goodwill or Salvation Army in the States), and Nick saw a real opportunity. Here are a few pictures:

You can find more photos on my Flickr Siegen page.

Biking and Freudenberg

After lunch, Kathy and I went biking. (Yeah!). We rode down the bike trail along the Sieg river (after a short attempt to bike up a vertical hiking trail.) Here are a couple of photos:

When we got back, David and Inga-Lill drove us out to a traditional historic German village named Freudenberg about 15 minutes from Siegen. Here are a few pictures of that outing as well:

Another wonderful day. (I still woke up at 1:00 AM, but this time I went back to sleep on my own instead of waking Kathy up to discuss it.)