Hänsel und Gretel

You'd think being grown up people would make them a little more careful, wouldn't you?

Saturday morning my mother-in-law got up early, dropped the family dog at my apartment and went off mushroom hunting with her brother. Four or five hours is the norm for her on these little jaunts so I was expecting her back around 1pm. She didn't arrive. 2pm. 3pm. She still didn't show up to pick up the dog. Not that me keeping the dog was a big deal but my MIL is seldom late for anything.

Finally the 3:30pm football match was about to begin when the phone rang. It was B's aunt reporting that the brother and sister mushroom hunting team had wandered so far into the wood that they had become lost. Just clueless as to where they were. Luckily at one point they'd run into a fellow mushroom hunter who informed them that they were well away from where they'd parked the car and gave them a general direction in which to walk to find a little town.

After a lot more walking they found the little village and tried to call another neighboring village that has a taxi. Evidently that taxi service is some dude with an Audi and an answering machine because the machine is all they reached. Happily though when inquiring at a house on the square about the possibility of another taxi service the gentleman they were questioning offered to drive them back to where Uncle Gerald's car was parked. By the time 5:30pm rolled around my MIL was safely back home. Exhausted and dying for a cigarette, to be sure, but no signs of being tortured by a witch living in a gingerbread house. All in all they'd wandered about 25 kilometers from where they'd parked, most of the time carrying a large box of mushrooms.

She even laughed when she came in my apartment and I looked up at her and said "So Gretel...finally made it back home, did you? Next time take white stones with you instead of the bread crumbs.".

I must remember to ask her if the mushroom hunter they ran into was being accompanied by seven short men in pointy caps.