Caribou? Yup, Two-Footed German Caribou.

First of all, before I begin my un-holiday-spirit-like rant, I hope you all enjoyed the year of 2010 and are having a great New Year.  That said ...
Holiday buses should run on holidays!!  I mean, some people (say, my family?) actually get out on New Years day, do not have a car, need food, want to get out of a tiny hotel room and stuff like that.  My dad looked up the Hohenfels holiday bus schedule this morning so that we could ride around base and pick up a few necessities.  So we all got bundled up to trek down to the bus stop.  The bus did not come.  And then I allowed myself to get roped into walking across the base to the shoppette that may or may not be open.  In the snow.  I don't know what I was thinking, I was not wearing walking shoes.  Those boots were purely ornamental.  Well, we got to the shoppette which was open and I did not die.  I came close to, but I did not die.
Now, in case you were wondering, there is a connection to my near death experience and the title of this post.  All along our extremely strenuous forced march there were several different animal tracks in the snow.  Some that looked like a rabbit's, some like a cat's, others that we weren't so sure about.  I identified them as caribou tracks using my tremendously educated knowledge of the outdoors.  My dad pointed out that there are no caribou in Germany and I countered with the all purpose: How do you know?  Maybe the caribou had grown tired of where ever they were from and migrated to Germany?  Then one of my family members tried to debunk my theory by asking why the tracks looked like they belonged to a two-footed animal.  And yet again I gracefully defended my position through a lengthy explanation of how the caribou mutated into bipeds when they migrated to Germany.  That stopped their critical remarks.
Then we saw the deer.  I watched my theory crumble before my eyes.  And we were only half-way to the shoppette ...
~RM