The Greatest Show On Earth

Of course we're all suckers for sparkles in little boys' eyes. Currently you can basically launch Macy's style fireworks, if you head east for a few miles just beyond the outskirts of Munich. We all met up at the daycare center and went out to the big biannual expo for construction machinery.



This is one of the largest displays of heavy machinery in the world. And the greatest thing is - you can climb on any machine you choose to, sit in the diggers's cabs, take the controls of road rollers and climb on seats of machines you don't even know what they do. They also give you glossy catalogues with shiny photos of that heavy piece of equipment you pretended to operate. There's also great entertainment. All the bigger companies put up dancing machine shows. We were of course especially proud to find that there was a ballet of machines by Doosan, a company Fred worked for in New York for a while. Hard to describe what they do, they're a Korean mega-corporation that builds whole cities for emerging nations and just owns a lot of stuff. It kinda failed to impress Karl, but I guess mom's CV trivia could not quite keep up with the choreographed movements of five diggers and a humongous dipper truck.



Well, the rest of the post might as well be for Karl's enjoyment tomorrow, when he tries to remember some of the approximately 30 machines he took the helm of.



It was kind of surprising to see, how nonchalant everybody was about children climbing around on those machines. Some of the mining machiens were so high that we just couldn't climb up to the cab with a two and a half year old. But there was plenty other in all sizes and shapes. and of course we had to climb up the talk of the town - the world's largest truck, the T 282 dipper truck for open pit mining, 7,4 meters high, 237 tons of weight, powered by a 3650 hp engine. We gotta ask mom tomorrow to circle where we're standing high up on the bridge.
In the end Karl of course got to pick a toy digger from a huge display at the Caterpillar store. Despite the overwhelming choice he went right for a telescope arm digger and stuck to it. It was kinda hard though to convince him that sleeping with a plastic digger half your own size in your bed might be kind of uncomfortable.



We leave you with a glimpse of one of the digger ballets we got to enjoy. Alright. We put this video up for Karl to watch tomorrow....