Germany 2014 - Part 2

The next day we decided to head out to see some castles.  We had originally decided to go to Neuschwanstein Castle, that's the big castle that you see on all the puzzles and posters.  I really wanted to go there, but we realized that we were over 3 hours away, which makes an over 6 hours round trip, it's supposedly overrun with tourists, you have to wait hours to get in and we wouldn't be able to see anything else that day.  So, we opted out and decided to visit some closer castles.  We started out with Hohenzollern Castle. It was really fun driving up to this castle and seeing it perched up on the hilltop.

We had to park at the base of the hill and either take a bus to the castle or walk up.  Of course, we opted to hike up to the top.  It was a pretty steep walk, but a beautiful area to walk through.  I think my favorite part of this castle was walking up the entry way.

You enter through a gate, but then the road runs in a circular path for quite a ways until you get to the top.  Kind of hard to explain, but it was very unique.  We spent a while walking around the grounds and then took a guided tour through the castle rooms that were open to the public.  In Germany, you don't get to just walk through the castles, you have to take a tour and of course, they are in German.  We kind of wish that we had opted out of this tour, because it was kind of long and the rooms weren't all that spectacular.  The castle is still owned and used by the "royal family" in Germany.

Our next castle was Lichtenstein Castle.

This was my most favorite castle of our trip and one of the most picturesque castles I've ever seen.  And the best part was there was hardly anyone there!  We opted to not take the guided German tour, although I kind of regret not going into this castle.  It was so fun walking around the grounds though and taking in the view.  So beautiful!

 

After leaving the area, we headed to a city called Ulm.  We had received a recommendation to go there because the Ulm Minster (church) has the tallest church tower in the world!

 Of course, we had to climb it!  After climbing 768 steps up this tiny stone circular stairway, we found ourselves 469 feet in the air.

Barely wide enough for one person to walk up.  It was tricky trying to pass anyone, especially while holding onto little kids hands.

The steeple rises higher than that, up to 530 feet. Noah had fallen asleep in the car on the way to Ulm and we had to wake him up when we got there, so he was a little grumpy to start with and then when we made him walk up all those stairs, he was a little put out.  Once we got to the top, he developed a major fear of heights and was pretty upset at being up so high.  But, once we got back down, he decided that was his favorite thing we'd done so far and wanted to climb it again.  It was definitely a neat experience.  The view was amazing.  You could even see the Alps in the very far distance.  We had dinner in Ulm and briefly walked around the city before heading back to our room for the night.  It had been an amazing day!

This was the resting area before the last extremely narrow flight of stairs.  See that round part of the tower behind the kids, the flight of stairs was inside of that.

This was maybe 1/10th of the way up.  Noah was already wondering if we were there yet.

Haha!  One of my favorite pictures.  Noah was not happy about the dizzying heights.