The tale of a grate cent

Nope, there is not a typo in the title. Bill is holding a one cent euro in the audience of my daughter Grace and our friend Mike. Bill managed to retrieve the cent from under a grate at the bottom of the steps into Schloss Burg (a castle we toured in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.) We had been in Germany nearly two weeks without one sidewalk coin sighting when we spotted this one through the grate, about 8 inches down. My ever clever husband bent the bottom of a sheet of paper and scooped the cent up close enough to pull it through the grate. How ever did it get there in the first place? I can only imagine. And so I did. I think I have a German counterpart who goes around dropping one cent pieces in various locales for other people to find who can then speculate on where said coins have been before sending them along on their journeys. I indeed left a trail of U.S. pennies in Germany -- in train seats, castle windows, the steps to the Grimm brothers' boyhood home, the fountain pictured in my last blog post, the hands of my new German friends, etc. (Last summer, I left pennies all over NYC and Philadelphia.) The one cent euro in Bill's hand is now in a plastic tube on my dresser, a far cry from the German castle, but my castle nonetheless.