Favorite and Least Favorite

May 19: Munich was a bit of a surprise to us.   We only added it onto our itinerary because it was so much cheaper to rent a car there than in Switzerland or Italy, but we really ended up enjoying our short time there.

It's a beautiful city with interesting history, reasonable prices, and many lovely buildings.   And best of all, it seemed like such a cheerful place.   So many of the cities we visited seemed entirely peopled with unhappy citizens who were unfriendly and rarely smiled, while Munich seemed to be filled with the nicest people.  

It was pouring rain while we were there (surprise!), but we thoroughly enjoyed our walk through the center of town, including  a charming little market that sold a fun variety of food and souvenirs.

Unfortunately we didn't give ourselves as much time in Munich as I would have preferred, but it was time to move on to the rest of our journey!     First stop:   Neuschwanstein Castle!   

Actually, this first picture isn't of Neuschwanstein, but of nearby Hohenschwangau Castle, which was one of the childhood homes of King Ludwig and a big part of the inspiration for him to build Neuschwanstein where he did.   

He was a bit of a recluse and was drawn to the idyllic and beautiful setting of these lovely mountains of Bavaria.

He built Neuschwanstein high up on a hilltop to be a place for solitude and repose.  The hilltop location, however, made it difficult to build and he never saw it fully finished in his lifetime.   

The architecture is stunningly beautiful and it's so picturesque that it's actually used as a model for the Walt Disney castle.  

For as picturesque as the castle is though, it's actually quite challenging to get a good picture of it.   You can either see it from far away....

Or from right up close...

It's quite a trek to get up the hill to the castle from the parking areas, but our kids are troupers and have finally reached a point in their development that they do not complain about long walks anymore!  Hallelujah!

Thankfully we had a bunch of umbrellas that we had procured during our rainy day in Rome!

And there were some hot pretzels to give us a little energy for the long wet walk down!

It ended up being one of our favorite stops of the whole trip, which was good, because after our visit there, we were off to one of our least favorite stops of our whole trip.

Lucerne, Switzerland.  

I thought I'd done my due diligence and picked a great city to stop in, but, alas, it lacked personality, was grossly expensive, wasn't all that pretty (the city itself), and the people were among the unfriendliest we met on our whole trip.   The best part about Lucerne was the scenic drive in and out of the city.

That is why I don't have a single picture of Lucerne and would not recommend it to someone planning their own trip to Europe.

Stay tuned for more European adventures to come!

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Italy to Germany

May 18:  We woke up first thing this morning, checked out of our apartment,  and headed to the La Spezia train station.  After a tad bit of frustration figuring out all the details, we eventually purchased train tickets to Munich, Germany for the 6 of us.

We had to switch trains twice and  overall it was a long day (about 10 hours) ....

during which we slept, read....

and enjoyed the very  beautiful scenery.

Our neighbors on the train probably thought we were  a tad geeky, because we couldn't stop taking pictures out of the windows of the moving train!

We decided that we definitely need to come back to Austria someday!

We oohed and ahed over the scenery all the way to Munich, where we picked up a rental car and headed onto the next leg of our journey!  

But not before enjoying one of our favorite meals of the whole trip at a restaurant called Limani!

It was a pain to get to the restaurant in our beast of a rental car, but the mediterranean food was delicious (and not overly expensive) and the servers were friendly and welcoming.    We would definitely go back if we ever visit Munich again!

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Flashback Friday: Visiting the Berlin Wall

As part of geography in our homeschool we've been learning about Europe.  It's the only place in the world that I've actually visited other the US, Canada, and Mexico, so it's been fun to share some of my memories with them of what it is like there.

My family didn't have lots of money, but I did have a dad who loved to travel and made it a priority to make sure we kids got a chance to see a little more of the world.   It was 1987 and the oldest five of us kids, plus two friends joined my mom and dad for a trip of a lifetime to Europe.  To save money we intended to camp most of the time we were there and had a big utilitarian van rented to drive everywhere.

Unfortunately 1987 turned out to be one of the coldest, rainiest summers in European history (to this day you can actually still read articles about how unusually cold and wet it was) and camping proved to be more miserable than we could bear sometimes.  We did still camp a lot of the time, but we ended up in hotels far more often than my parents budgeted for and even still spent a good portion of the trip damp and shivering.    We visited 13 countries (France, England, Austria, Luxembourg, Lichtenstein, East Germany, West Germany, Hungary, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia) and despite the bad weather had a mostly fantastic time.  

One of my most vivid memories of the trip was our time spent in Berlin.   We spent time in both East and West Berlin and we were all struck by the  appalling and stark differences between the two sides.  Although previously the vibrant capital city of Germany, a couple of decades of separation had lent two very different feelings to the two sides.  Gray and depressing is the best way I can think to describe East Berlin (and the other Eastern European cities that we visited) and I don't know how you could ever get used to the machine guns everywhere you turned.   The buildings, the streets, and even the people lacked the color, vitality, and drive that we found abundantly through most of Europe and we all left there with a strong appreciation for what it meant to be an American.

Me with four of my seven siblings standing on the West side of the Berlin Wall.
Don't judge my crazy hair--remember that not only had we been camping in the wet and the cold,
but clearly my hair was suffering for lack of a curling iron with proper European voltage!

 A bit more than two years after that trip was when I heard the news that the Berlin Wall was being ripped down.  I remember being awestruck and excited as my family sat glued to the television coverage of the wall being torn down.   I still get emotional when I think of what that moment meant for the families who had been separated for so many years!


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"The wall was an edifice of fear. On Nov. 9 , 1989, it became a place of joy. For 28 years, East Germans could not even approach it. On Nov. 9, 1989, people danced on it - and the world looked different afterward" - 

German President Horst Koehler.