And I couldn’t help but find it so incredibly beautiful. This cannot all be by chance. This feeling of beauty must be more than just a feeling and it must point to something more than just myself. There has to be a God. A good God. A God who is a beautiful family. A God who desires us to be in a beautiful family. A family that is love and that is so beautiful that the mountains, the lakes, and the clouds and the grass reflect their beauty.

If you’ve ever heard a child giggle with you, you know the love of God firsthand.

When we returned home after the ride through the mountains, Steve and I had to quickly depart for Rome. We ate a wonderful supper, full of traditional Weisswurste (oooh, so amazingly good!), pretzels, and—yes—beer.

And knowing that we loved the Spatzel so much, Lucia gave us her Spatzel-making instrument. “You won’t find these in the States,” she laughed. She is generously wonderful.