Our wunderbar trip

I mentioned in my New Year's post that we have a couple awesome trips planned this year. We just got back from one of them. We have friends who have been stationed in Germany for the next three years. As soon as we heard the news, I told them, "We are coming to visit you!"

It was perfect, because these friends have two kids that Jack just adores. It was the prospect of seeing them again that kept him excited to go on the trip, because otherwise, why would we want to leave all his toys and friends in San Diego? We learned this the hard way when we went to Spain.

We left on Saturday, June 4. It was Violet's first time on an airplane. She was really good. So was Jack, although he was pretty scared during takeoff and when we hit turbulence. Thank goodness for computer games, movies, and Benadryl.

Our friends live in a little town called Idstein, which is about 40 minutes from the Frankfurt airport. It was Sunday by the time we landed. Our first day there, we mostly got settled into their house and then walked into the heart of their little town to check out the (very small) local wine festival and have the first of many gelatos (gelati?).

The next day, they drove us to Mainz, a nearby city. We visited a couple of cathedrals, including one that featured stained glass windows created by Marc Chagall, and saw some Roman ruins, unexpectedly housed underneath a shopping mall.

If I could sum up this trip in three words, it would be: Churches and gelato. We visited at least one of the former and consumed one of the latter almost every single day of the trip.

Our third day there was a Tuesday. All the houses we saw in Germany have bunker shades, which are essentially blackout shades on the outside of the windows. They need them, because they are so far north that it's really only dark for about six hours a night. The problem with them, though, is that it's really hard to tell what time it is. When we woke up on Tuesday, I looked at my analog watch. Even though it looked like the small hand was on the 12 and the big hand was on the 8, I just assumed that it was my early morning blurry vision and that it was only 8 o'clock. Violet woke up about 90 minutes later, and Tom told me, "It's 1:30 in the afternoon!"

The jet lag was definitely a big deal on this trip. Germany is nine hours ahead of us. That plus the fact that we were all fighting off colds made it really hard to motivate in the morning. Jack had such a hard time waking up every morning, and that never happens at home.

It really was too bad about sleeping away most of the day Tuesday, though, because it was one of the nicer days weather-wise. It threatened rain most of the time we were there, although it didn't really ever pour on us. But it did make it kind of hard to plan what we were going to do. We ended up heading into Wiesbaden on Tuesday afternoon for dinner and sightseeing.

On Wednesday morning, Jack woke up early to attend a German class with his friend. He seemed to really like it. Then we drove to nearby Koln, which has a really famous cathedral. It also has a museum that houses the third largest collection of Picassos in the world.

This is the first trip to Europe where we actually had to rent a car. Normally, we stay in big urban cities where we either take public transportation or walk everywhere. But even though our friends' house was centrally located to a lot of things, it was about an hour's drive to anywhere. We looked into taking the train, but it would have been too expensive and taken too long to get where we wanted to go. And I think Tom enjoyed being able to drive on the Autobahn, at least at first.

On Thursday, we drove to Heidelberg to see the ruins of Heidelberg Castle, which was pretty much all we could convince Jack to do that day. I mentioned that the prospect of seeing his friends kept Jack interested in taking the trip in the first place. The downside of having friends there, however, is that all he wanted to do was stay in their house and play with them. The fact that they have a Wii made leaving the house to go sightseeing even less attractive to him. But of course we didn't fly all the way to Germany to play Wii with our friends, so we compromised. We went out, but we didn't see as much or stay as long as we would have without a recalcitrant little boy in tow.

Our friends have been traveling almost every weekend to nearby cities and countries. While we were there, we joined them on a trip to Nancy, France, and Luxembourg. While in Nancy (which we later learned was where Tom's father spent his time in the Army), we visited a couple of churches (of course), a really pretty square called Place Stanislas, and a beautiful botanical garden that featured a little zoo and playground.

While we were at Nancy, we had one of the best meals of our trip at a little restaurant called Chez Lize. I'll admit, the food in Germany wasn't great, especially for us as vegetarians. Thankfully, our friends are excellent hosts and really good cooks. And gelato was widely and cheaply available everywhere.

My policy on sweets for my kids has always been that I won't give it to them until they are old enough to ask. For Jack, that meant that he didn't get any sweets until he was 22 months old. But I don't know if it's because Violet is just a little more savvy or if the sweets are more prevalent now that we have Jack, but she really noticed it when everyone was eating gelato and she wasn't. And she made her dissatisfaction at that state of affairs known to us all, which means that she had more than her fair share (and I subsequently had less than my fair share) of gelato on this trip.

We toured a few cities in Luxembourg Saturday evening and all day Sunday. Luxembourg City was beautiful, and we just happened upon an evening half-marathon as we were walking around. It really added a festive air to our visit, especially when all the kids received cowboy hats, noisemakers, and balloons from the various sponsors of the race.

The next day, we toured the ruins of Beaufort Castle in Beaufort, stopped in Echternach for a church and gelato break, and hiked to the waterfalls in Mullerthal before heading back to our friends' house in Idstein. Jack was thrilled to be able to ride with his friends in their minivan almost the entire trip and watch their DVDs. Much more fun than riding with boring Mom and Dad in our cramped little compact car. Our friends really bent over backwards for us.

On Monday, we went with them to Koblenz and visited a butterfly garden and a nearby chateau. The chateau, which they rather optimistically billed as a "castle," was okay, but the butterfly garden was a lot of fun for the kids. When the Wild Animal Park in San Diego has their annual butterfly exhibit, they are very strict in admonishing us not to bother the butterflies in anyway. If they land on you, fine, but we are not to try to touch them. At this butterfly garden, they didn't care at all. I got several to come on to my finger and then I put them on the kids' fingers or their shirts or whatever. We got some pretty fun pictures.

On Tuesday, we took a cruise on the Rhine River. We started in this little town of Bacharach and cruised to St. Goar. Along the way, we saw castles on either side of the river. As we got to St. Goar, we passed the Loreley, a large rock that marks the narrowest part of the river. Local legend says there is a siren connected with the Loreley whose song so distracts sailors that they crash into the rocks below.

On our last full day in Germany, we drove into Frankfurt. We checked out a couple of churches, visited Old Town Frankfurt, and went souvenir shopping. That night, Jack finally got the sleepover he and the other kids had been asking for the entire time we were there. It was one of the things that helped comfort him, because he was so sad to be leaving his friends in Germany. I was touched when our friends' little girl asked if Jack could stay with them all the time.

The other thing that helped make Jack feel better about leaving was the prospect of seeing his aunt, cousins, and Nana in Connecticut. Tom's mom hadn't met Violet yet, and we figured stopping by on the way back from Germany would save us from having to make another long flight later on. Another unexpected benefit of this quick visit was that it also helped mitigate some of the jet lag coming back home. We were happily surprised when Tom's brother, who also hadn't met his newest niece yet, flew in for a visit.

We had a wonderful trip, but after 16 days, we were all happy to be back at Home Sweet San Diego. I'm not sure how many more of these long trips I can coax Jack into taking. He tells me he's scared of flying, and he really missed his friends in San Diego. But he had such fun everywhere we went and didn't want to leave. I'm optimistic I will make a world traveler of him yet.

P.S. I had grand plans to post a bunch of photos of the trip on here. But Blogger is a pain about photos, and I'm getting lazy. Maybe I'll do it if I get around to it. In the meantime, there are more photos than you could possibly want to see on Facebook.