Germany 2014 - Part 1

A couple of years ago, when we found out that Chad's SIP meeting would be in Germany this year, I said right away, "We are all going with you!"  But, as time got closer, we started thinking that maybe it would just be better for Chad to go, so he could concentrate on the meeting.  In the end though, we decided it was just too good of an opportunity to pass up, since most of the transportation and hotel room would be paid for.  So, we planned out our 10 day vacation to Southern Germany.
We rented a car, since we didn't think our old clunker would make it and they upgraded the car, so it was a really nice car, really nice!  It was really hard to give it back after the trip was over. =)  We headed out for Germany and our long car ride to our first destination.  We took the ferry to Germany, which is always a fun little activity. 

Especially when the boat is covered in ladybugs.

The kids had to catch a few.  Our drive through Germany was beautiful.  Especially the farther south we got, we started seeing castles and churches all over the place.  So beautiful!  We had booked our first 2 rooms through a site called airbnb.  Basically people rent out apartments or rooms that they have.  We were a little nervous about this, but our first night was fantastic.  We headed way off the main road to this old Mill built in 1766!  It's a house now and we had the entire top floor apartment to ourselves.  It was super nice.

 I think this was our only picture of the car.  It was so nice to have air conditioning, personal climate controls, built in gps and other fun gadgets.

 The next morning, we were a little sad to leave, but we had a lot of ground to cover to get to Stuttgart.  Along the way, we stopped in Rothenburg ob der Tauber.  What a fantastic little town.  It has a very interesting history, especially during World War 2.  The Nazi's claimed it as the ideal Germany town and it was used in a lot of Nazi propaganda.  At the end of the war, the town was bombed, with many buildings being destroyed, but not near as bad as many other Germany cities.  The US military sent in someone with a white flag to ask them to give up the city, so that it could be preserved, and the guy in charge of Rothenburg said ok, going against Hitler's orders and thus preserving the town.  Very interesting history!  It's one of the only towns in the world that still has a medieval wall surrounding the entire town.  And the town itself is really well preserved, not much has changed since the 17th century.  We got to walk around the wall and through the city. It was so fun and we wished that we'd had more time there.

This old tower is actually used as a bathroom now!

Noah took a bunch of fun pictures like this as we were eating lunch.

 That evening, we headed further to our place in Stuttgart.  Also booked through airbnb and we were a little freaked out to discover that we had inadvertently booked a room in someone's house!  Not our own apartment, like we had thought.  It was super awkward, but Ursula, our host made us feel comfortable and although we would certainly avoid accommodations like that in the future, it wasn't as bad as it could have been.  I think we were mostly frustrated that the room was really cluttered with personal belongings and we were worried about our kids touching things, etc.  But, they were super great, no problems! Our host even mentioned to us after that she was happy with how good our kids were.