Visiting Germany

Back in 2005, our family moved to Germany to live for a year.  It was really stressful to move there but once we settled in, it was really enjoyable (until it was time to move back and then it was stressful again).  We made a good friend while we were there, a really friendly older woman who wished for grandchildren but didn't have any.  She adopted our children as her surrogate grandchildren and she especially loved it when I would have her babysit my youngest children during the day while I ran errands.  Mindy who was just a year old at the time was her favorite.

Ever since then, she has really wanted us to come back and visit her and we decided back in November or December that this was the year to do it.  Our friend is not getting any younger and it seemed like a good time.  So we found relatively inexpensive tickets flying out of Las Vegas which meant we had to drive some hours to get there.  We flew into London on Virgin Atlantic (the kids loved watching non-stop movies all ten hours of the flight) and then took a super cheap flight to Munich on EasyJet--a low budget airline if there ever was one.

I thought the name of the big boat of a plane we flew on was pretty ironic:  "Tinker Belle".  I wasn't sure how they even get those things in the air but they do.

We had a few hours to wait at Gatwick Airport before our flight to Munich and the kids just crashed.  They had spent the 10-hour flight from Vegas watching all the movies and hadn't slept at all.

The green house is the one we lived in although it was white at the time.

The park near our house was a highlight for our kids and it was on this trip too.

The weather was a little chilly when we first arrived but warmed up quickly.

We left our house early on Monday morning and arrived in Munich around dinnertime on Tuesday evening.  We were pretty tired but our friend was happy to see us and fed us some nice dinner.

On Wednesday we visited the Olympic Park in Munich and Scott took the children to the top of the Olympic tower.  He also took them out on the small lake in a paddle boat.  I was feeling cold and my foot was bothering me so I just sat a lot.


We stayed with our friend for two nights and then took off for Salzburg, not wanting to wear out our welcome.

This is inside the Salzburg Cathedral which is very beautiful and large.  I especially enjoyed the visiting children's choir that happened to be singing when we walked in.  They sounded really good.

This is in front of the house where Mozart was born.  The old city is very crowded with both buildings and people.

This is in front of the river that separates old town Salzburg from the new town.

We visited the old city of Salzburg on Thursday including the house where Mozart was born.  We also drove by the house where the Sound of Music was supposedly filmed which is now a hotel.  The next day, we had the dilemma of trying to find a washing machine.  They don't really believe in laundromats in Germany and when I finally found one to use, it seemed cheaper and easier to buy some new clothes than to wash the ones we had.  Besides that, the weather was warmer than we had packed for and we needed some cooler clothing.  So we bought a few things for the kids and our friend did our laundry for us when we got back to Neufahrn.

After shopping, we visited Berchtesgaden and took a bus up to see The Eagle's Nest.  It's a building at the top of a mountain in the Alps that dates from Hitler's time and was a gift to Hitler for his birthday. What's amazing are the views from the top.  It's really beautiful country.

We were also going to visit the salt mines but it seemed like we had already spent plenty of money and time on the Eagle's Nest and besides that, we needed to fix Scott's phone problem.  That ended up being a significant problem for us on this trip.  My phone didn't work at all because it was too old and didn't have the right network connections.  Scott's phone worked some of the time but would stop working periodically which was very inconvenient especially when we needed his Google Maps app to get around. But when we lived here we had no cell phones at all!  We just used paper maps to get around and most of the time it worked okay.

That night we stayed in our friend's weekend house which she no longer uses.  It was also in a beautiful area and was VERY quiet and dark at night.  We enjoyed the sausages and brats we cooked that night for dinner along with the potatoes and asparagus.  It turns out that my favorite dinners on vacation are the ones we can cook ourselves.

On Saturday, we met up with David and Stephanie and their two children down at the Konigssee which is a big lake in the Alps.  We took a ferry to the HerrnInsel (Men's Island) to see the castle that Crazy King Ludwig built.  He patterned it after Versailles but ran out of money so he couldn't finish it and besides that, he died not long after he moved in.  It's an interesting castle but pretty sad too to leave that as your legacy.

That night we ate dinner back in Neufahrn with our friend and her son and girlfriend who were hosting David and Stephanie.  They fed us some delicious pasta.

Visiting our friends Waltraud Czadek, her son Michael, and his girlfriend.

The next day was Sunday and we decided to visit a German ward in Munich that started at 9:30am rather than wait for the English-speaking ward that started at 2:00pm.  That turned out to be a good decision because that Sunday was stake conference.  So not only were we a little early to the right building (the stake center) but we also got translation!  Big win.  I really enjoyed stake conference and feeling the spirit there.  The choir was great and the people we talked to were friendly.  We were able to talk to a few people that we had known when we were in Germany before.

Afterwards, we had lunch on the lawn and then we went out to the English gardens which is a very large park in downtown Munich.  Unfortunately most of Munich seemed to be there too.  But we met David's friend and strolled around.

Sunday evening we drove out to visit our friends the Borns and they fed us a very traditional German dinner--a potato and sausage casserole.

The river that runs through the English Gardens--the Elbe--has a spot where it comes out from under a street and provides perfect surfing conditions--so people can surf in downtown Munich!

Visiting Franz, Jamile, Evelyn, and Jocy Born

On Monday, we met David and Stephanie down at the zoo and after a few hours, they took off for Vienna.

The playgrounds in Germany always amazed us with the lack of concern about "safety".  So the playgrounds there are a lot more daring and fun.

The mama polar bear and her baby were doing what we wanted to do--it was unusually warm that day and all Scott and I had were long-sleeved shirts.

Tuesday morning we said our goodbyes to our good friend and then flew to London!  There were the usual challenges of traveling with children (laundry, bathrooms, food, fatigue, expense) that I always seem to forget about but we were glad we got to go.