If a friendship lasts longer than fifteen years, you're no longer friends. You're family.

Since childhood, Lorna has been curious about Germany and her ancestral roots there. She was fourteen when her great-grandfather died, a man who was born in what is now part of Ukraine but who was a self-proclaimed, proud German.

Having grown up during the Cold War, Lorna had always viewed the former East and West Germany as being starkly different until 1999, when she met Christine, a woman from the former East Germany who became one of Lorna's closest lifetime friends.

Over twenty-five years, Lorna made several trips to Germany in search of the world's largest cuckoo clock, a hotel in Berlin where guests can sleep in a coffin or prison cell, another hotel along the Rhein River that is owned by a family who may or may not be Lorna's distant relatives, sausage that meets the Nuremberg Sausage Protection Association's standards, and the best view of Neuschwanstein Castle.

In her most recent memoir, travel and humour writer Lorna Stuber tells of her adventures in Germany while she reconnects with and learns more about her familial ties to Europe.

Rebecca H. Lee