Picnic 2011

You might remember our trip to see the Austrian border near our house last fall where we got to see pictures of the former iron curtain and the armed border guards on horses. This is the first place we take visitors, so Deb, Eric, and Kim should recognize the place.

We even showed you a picture of the invitation that Hungarians passed out to thousands of vacationing East Germans at Lake Balaton in August 1989 inviting them to come to the border at Sopron for a special picnic on August 19 to get a souvenir piece of the iron curtain. Here they burst through the border gate and fled into Austria, an action that resulted in the fall of the Berlin Wall a couple of months later.

Here's a reconstructed stretch of the iron curtain at the border.The bike path in the background used to be the "no man's land," the last stretch you had to cross to get to Austria without getting shot.

Sopron celebrates this event every year with its own family picnic on the site. You can see children climbing on the monument to freedom.

Here they are enjoying an old fashioned basket ride.

The puppet show was about picking up trash.

Hey, isn't that the missionaries? Is that their new mission car?

No, its a fancied up Trabant, one of the East German cars that were abandoned by the hundreds by fleeing East Germans. Now they are a collectors item. Here is a shot for Dondavid of the Trabant engine, about the same size as a lawn mower engine. It doesn't even fill a third of the engine compartment.