We're talking about a thousand pictures or so.
We had a relaxing few days chilling around the house and packing after the kids were finished with school, and then we flew to Budapest on June 20. The flight was easy and the kids did fine. We left at a normal reasonable time like 6 AM instead of something ridiculous like 2 AM like we always do when we fly home to the US, and we arrived with plenty of time left in the day to go exploring and get settled in. When we got to the Budapest airport, we couldn't tell what would be the best way to get to our apartment, but a very eager gentleman approached us and offered to drive us in his private taxi. Giving us totally unsolicited tour-guide commentary in his beat up old Ford, he very excitedly gave us the grand tour as he drove, using his broken English to tell us about all the things that we were seeing along the drive. It took us about 20 minutes to get to our apartment, so he had plenty of time to talk. It turned out that he had been on the Hungarian Olympic team just a few years before my coworker, Csaba Hegyes. When we got to our apartment, it was right on a main street next to the trolley line (on Erzsebet krt.), tucked between a bar and a restaurant and halfway between a Supermarket and the Oktogon metro stop. We buzzed to enter and the owner of the apartment came out to give us the keys and give us a tour. She was an old lady who didn't really speak any English at all, so she pantomimed everything for us and was quite sweet. First we walked down a long hallway to a central courtyard at the middle of building that she had set up as a public garden. Our apartment was across the garden on the left side. It was nice that it was so far set back from the street, because the street was very noisy each night. The apartment was very comfortable, decorated in a very modern in a minimalist way (probably everything was from IKEA), and the kids loved it. So did Rachel and I.
After unpacking just a bit, we got some food from the grocery store down the street and had a nice lunch of fresh food fruit, fresh bread, fresh cheese, and some yogurt. Then we set out to explore. We walked past the opera house and zigzagged through the streets to the northwest until we finally reached the parliament building. It was beautiful, and the kids really were excited to see that a trolley system went right past the building. We also walked over to the river and saw the basilica and the fisherman's bastion at the top of the hills across the river. We also found a small playground just across the street from a monument and a water fountain you can play in. Several of us accidentally got soaked in it. Then we walked back home and got dinner at a restaurant down the street from where we lived. We had some delicious food, all very traditionally Hungarian.
I had a lot of chicken paprikas that night because the kids only ate a part of theirs. I tried to splurge by getting a very traditional desert too, but it turned out to be little more than cottage cheese balls breaded and fried with cream on top and just a little bit of jam on the plate next to them. It really wasn’t very sweet at all, so hardly something I would consider a dessert. But I guess that's the risk you take when you're eating traditional food. Mostly it's just us Americans to overdo it on the sugar. Finding out how little the dinner cost, as well as how much we could get at the grocery store was a nice surprise.The next day we went to visit a lake and park at the castle in the middle of town. At the pond there was a golden retriever swimming around after the ducks and the kids were very excited to see it. I was a bit worried that it would climb out of the water and shake itself off and soak us all, but fortunately it stayed in the pond. We soon found the park that we were searching for, and then went to try to get a bus to the train museum outside town. In what was the most unpleasant and unfortunate part of our entire trip, we missed the stop, ended up going about 40 minutes past it, got wrong directions from several different people, and finally gave up. With me in a very grumpy mood and all the kids disappointed, we went home.I learned my lesson to be much better prepared with all of our plans for using public transport for the rest of the trip.
The next day, we went to Margaret island in the middle of the river to meet Heidi Carson who also happened to be in Budapest the same week that we were. Our kids played together at the playground, but it was uncomfortably hot, so I didn't enjoy that part much. Then we rented little golf carts that had been made to look like old-time cars and drove around the island for about an hour. That was nice, but we didn't get to see very much after all, because the carts drove so slowly. However, we did get to see a musical fountain that the the kids loved. It was obviously computer timed and controlled, because it was quite an impressive show.
In the afternoon, after a nap for the kids, we all went to the Fishermen's Bastion at the top of the hill. It had a beautiful church, and an almost Disneyfied look to it, but I suppose that's because Disney took inspiration from so many pieces of European architecture. It certainly gave us a great view of the city. We walked from the bastion to Buda Castle, and by that time it was getting pretty hot. Kids were grumpy, and entering the castle was expensive, so we just walked around the outside of it to see the fountains and exterior architecture. Rachel saw a stand selling a traditional desert (Kürtőskalács) that she was eager to try, so we all sat down in the shade of a hedge to eat the desert. It looked like it was the dough of a cinnamon bun that had been stretched into a long snake, then coiled around some sort of pipe and cooked to form a cylinder. You could buy it with any number of different toppings, but we just went with sugar. It was hot and fresh and delightful, and we all enjoyed it thoroughly. We had dinner that night at home, and then the kids went to bed and I went shopping. All evening we had been hearing cheering from the apartments around us, and on the way home we noticed that lots of people had flags painted on their faces, so we assumed that there must be some sort of big game on for the EuroCup of football. When I went outside there was loud cheering and thousands of people walking down the street. The street was so full of people that they could hardly move, and the trams weren't running at all. People were climbing on top of lampposts and bus stands dancing and singing and cheering and setting off fireworks and flares, and probably 90% of the people were drunk. I walked down the street to the grocery store just to buy our groceries, and the whole store was packed with people, too, just celebrating and dancing and cheering, and again and everyone of them was in there to buy alcohol. They said they had beat Portugal. People laughed when they saw that I was just doing grocery shopping. So ended June 22.
The next day we walked past Parliament again and to the river so that Rachel could see the Shoes on the River memorial, which were a bunch of metal shoes meant to represent the shoes of the Jews who had been executed in a pogrom there along the river’s edge. We didn't tell the kids what it meant, because Rachel felt it would be too depressing to them. We then walked further along the river to the chain bridge, which is one of several interesting bridges that cross the river. I was surprised to see that the chain consisted not of O-shaped links, but rather flat links that looked more like a bike chain, but with many more stacked plates in each link. We walked across it and thought about taking the funicular up to Buda Castle again, but the price was too high and it wasn't covered by our Budapest tourist card even though it said in the card’s pamphlet that we could ride. So, disappointed, we went back to a park that I had seen on the way there with big Olympic rings in it.The park was free and had a very fun play structure in it, shaped like a giant boat, so we had a snack there and let the kids play until it was time for lunch. That afternoon, after the kids’ naptime and Rachel's schoolwork time, we went back to Margaret Island. We took the bus to the far north end that we hadn’t reached the first time, and then walked back south toward the part that we had covered the first time we went. I think we got to see everything that we wanted to. Unfortunately, all the churches were locked, so we just had to satisfy yourselves getting pictures of outside of them and wandering a lot through the ruins of the monasteries. This was one of several occasions on our vacation when we had to save Amelia from a toilet accident by letting her to just put on a diaper temporarily, a trick that we learned with Elliott in a subway station when we went to Spain two years earlier. We went out for dinner again that night at a restaurant called Rhapsody, and the kids had great fun playing peekaboo with the hostess who stood by trying to get other people to come eat at the restaurant.
On the 24th we went to St. Stephen’s Basilica. It was very impressive, and we even got see the purported mummified hand of St. Stephen in the back. Unfortunately, the treasury cost more money to go in and look around, so we didn't pay for that. That afternoon, we went to find another church called St. Elizabeth church. It looked like almost no tourists ever went to visit there, as it was located in a sort of rundown neighborhood on the wrong side of the tracks, with people who looked homeless sitting and chatting with each other on the benches outside in the overgrown lawn next to the cracking asphalt driveway, looking very surprised to see us there. It was quite the contrast between the very touristy St. Stephen's Basilica, and the obviously well-used and well loved St. Elizabeth Church, which was full of bulletin boards listing community activities and packed with pictures of kids at Bible camps. On the way home we stopped at another park we discovered online which promised a water play area, but didn't appear to have when we got there, or at least it was turned off. But after a few minutes of playing in the playground, we noticed that the water was on, so the kids ran down and played in it for little while until it turned off again.They were very hesitant to get into the water at first, but soon they were running and laughing and jumping and screaming and having great time. It turned off soon after, so they went and played in the playground again for a half hour, and then came back when the water turned on again.L ydia got worn out and crabby, so she went home with Rachel to cook dinner while I stayed with Elliott and Amelia.
I mentioned earlier that Rachel would do her schoolwork during the naptime between our morning excursions in our afternoon excursions, but it was really only a naptime for Lydia.The other two kids refused to attempt to sleep or even be quiet, so I usually had to take them out and go explore around the city to keep them out of Rachel's hair and let her concentrate. One day we rode the tram in front of our apartment all the way to its terminus at the north end, which included a little play area with some metal sparrows scattered around the planter boxes. Another day, Elliott and I walked to a park called Klauzal ter near a farmer’s market, which became another go-to spot for times when we knew the kids couldn’t handle sight-seeing. It had a zipline and all sorts of other fun stuff for the kids that they hadn’t seen at other parks. Not having a break at lunchtime made me very grumpy in the afternoons, so we made sure to find away to get some alone time for me as well. For example, one night I walked to the train station to buy our Eurail passes. I took all the money and passports and all the documents we might need and started off. I wanted to make sure that I knew how to get there so that we would be on time for our morning trip on the day we had to go to Vienna. When I got to the train station, I went to an office that said International Tickets on the sign. After waiting 40 minutes I got to the front of the line and the person told me the tickets for the Eurail were in a different office. They gave me directions to go find it on the first platform, but I looked for 15 minutes and couldn't see it anywhere. Just when I was about to give up, I noticed a tiny 2 inch by 8 inch sign that was little more than a sticker on the window of the business class lounge.I went inside, and sure enough, that was the place to pick up our passes. However, they were closing, so I ended up having to come back in the morning to get the tickets. So we all left extra early the next morning from our apartment to begin our journey to Vienna. It worked out fine, the trip on the train was nice but hot, and we got to Vienna on the afternoon of the 25th.
Vienna
When we arrived, we took the metro to a stop (Taborstrasse) as close to our apartment on Grosse Schiffgasse as we thought we could get, and then started walking from there with all our luggage. We were supposed to meet the person who would unlock our AirBNB apartment at 12:30, so we were in a real rush to get there. But when we arrived, he was not there and even after waiting for 15 minutes he still had not arrived. So I called using some international minutes on our phone to speak to the person who owned the apartment, and she agreed to call the guy who was supposed open it for us. As it turned out, that day was his son’s birthday and he had completely forgotten about us. He said he could be there in half an hour. However, we were all tired and hot from having been on a hot train and walking in the hot sun at noon on one of the hottest days on record in Vienna, and we didn't have any drinks or food because we ate all of it on the train because we thought we would to to be able to eat as soon as we arrived! So while Rachel entertained the kids on the sidewalk in front of our apartment building, I went exploring for a grocery store. Instead I found a little shop next to the farmers’ market where they sold drinks. I bought a bottle of water and a bottle of sparkling apple cider, as well as a very expensive pint of raspberries. About the time we finished all those off, the guy showed up and let us into the apartment. The apartment was clearly old and had been subdivided off of a bigger apartment, but it wasn't too small, and the guy said that to make up for making us wait he would give us the keys to the garden that we would've had to pay extra for otherwise.The apartment also had a loft made all of wood which the kids called a tree house, and under the loft was a sort of dark room, which we called “the cave.” Just as Rachel had anticipated when she booked it, the apartment was an instant hit with the kids. After lunch and a nap, we headed out. We just walked around and explored mostly on that first day, finding where our apartment’s nearest ATM and grocery store were, and then relaxing inside because it was so hot. We also did not intend to buy (or rather to activate) our Vienna card until we could use it for three days consecutively, and since the very next day was the Sabbath, we weren’t going to activate it yet.
We spent Sunday morning visiting parks across the river. On the way home, we discovered a metro station (Schottenring) that actually ran under the river so we could use it instead of going out of our way to cross the bridges, and it mas just down the street from our apartment. We used that as our subway stop for the rest of the visit. On Sunday afternoon, church started a little later in the day than we are accustomed to (2 pm instead of 9 am), so we thought it would be okay to walk a mile and a half to get there. It was another hot day and when we arrived we discovered that the church had no air conditioning just like every other place we had visited in Europe so far. But we managed to make it through the stifling sacrament meeting without anyone getting too grumpy, after which we were able to move downstairs into the classrooms were significantly cooler. We then walked home again, which the kids did not like very much, so everybody was pretty grumpy for the afternoon. However, there was some excitement as Elliott lost his second tooth. After the kids were in bed, Rachel and I spent our time planning are week’s activities and public transportation. Experience had already taught us that if we didn't, we would regret it immensely.
Monday we went to Schonbrunn Palace Outside of Vienna.This is one of the more frustrating sites of our trip because of how the ticketing structure was set up. The tickets were advertised as giving us access to all these different spots and different features of the Palace and its grounds, but what we learned only after visiting was that most of those features were open for free to the public. Had we gone to those free areas first, we could have taken our time enjoying them and then spent the half hour on the guided tour in the castle at the very end. Instead, we wasted a lot of time wandering around in front of the castle waiting for our scheduled tour to start, and then after the tour, we missed out on most of the things we wanted to do because we couldn't find the bathroom or because we just didn't know where to find them fast enough to see them before the place closed. And of course the kids needed to stop and rest about every 5 minutes as we walked around the giant gardens. Unfortunately I lost my cool on several occasions and ended up being disappointed with the whole visit. Looking back though,the palace was very beautiful and impressive, as were the grounds. And we learned a ton of other important lessons about how to manage our trip, like what sorts of deceptions we could expect from information booklets. It saved us headaches later on. Incidentally, on our way out of the garden in the evening, we heard a live performance coming from the concert shell that had been set up in the courtyard in front of Schonbrunn. I vaguely recognized the music and then suddenly it hit me that I was listening to Pink Floyd performing “Wish You Were Here.” Chances were, this was not just some cover band. But it was late enough, and we were all grumpy enough, and it was far enough away that we decided not to go back and listen to them, especially since the kids wouldn't appreciate it. (I later checked online, and sure enough, it was them!)
On Tuesday, June 28, we decided to visit the heart of the old town. We started with St. Stephen's Cathedral, which was the first place that I had visited when I stopped in Vienna for just one night on the way home from my Egypt study abroad in 2004. Though the cathedral was under major renovations on the outside, it was still impressive outside and certainly beautiful inside. The kids were extremely well behaved inside the church, and they seemed to recognize that it was a place of worship. Cathedrals have actually been some of their favorite places to visit, rather than castles as I would have anticipated. After St. Stephen's, we just wandered around on the streets of the old town, looking at shops and discovering whatever we happened to discover. We played around next to a fountain for some time and then headed home for Rachel to do her homework and for all of us to eat lunch and take naps. After lunch, we went in a slightly different direction to see the Vienna Opera House on the way to the butterfly house and the Albertina Museum. The kids loved the butterfly house despite it being excruciatingly hot and muggy inside. An imposing building next to the butterfly house caught my eye while we were eating our snacks in front of it, so Amelia and I went to explore and discover what it was. As it turned out, we walked the wrong direction to go around it because it was attached to the palace. We had to walk through half the palace grounds to get around in that direction while we could have just walked the length of the building in the other direction. On the front we discovered that it was the Austrian National Library, and although I wanted to explore that more, Amelia was starting to have a panic attack because of being away from her mommy and she really wanted to be with mommy, not with me. So again I was in a bad mood as we hurried back to meet up with the rest of the family again. The kids were less impressed with the Albertina than with the butterfly house, but they behaved well enough, and Rachel certainly was thrilled to get to show them all the original Monets, van Goghs, Picassos, Seurats, Signacs, Cezannes, Matisses, Munches, etc.
After the Albertina, we relaxed in the park behind the Austrian National Library near a statue of Mozart, and let the kids run free in the grass. Afterward we all walked to the front of the library to get pictures with a man who was blowing giant bubbles. On the façade of the library were statues of warriors from various eras in Austria's past, and I would love to find a website or a book that has detailed images of each of them as well as information about their costumes, but so far I've had no luck in finding one. I think we had dinner that day at the main Rosenberger restaurant, which is an Austrian national chain that has sort of road houses around the whole country. They had a “buy one adult meal get the kids meal free” deal, so it was probably the cheapest meal we ate out on our entire trip. In fact, it was so good and so affordable that we went back again later this week.
On the morning of the 29th, we went back to the same area of town, Museumsquartier, but approached it via a different subway station so that we could walk past the Rathaus and the parliament building on the way to the natural history museum. That museum turned out to be a disappointment for the kids because it didn't really have a lot of stuff set up in a way the kids would enjoy, or even be able to see; it seems like much more of a museum for adults. For example, the rock collections said practically nothing about the rocks, just had a whole bunch of them on display in display cases that were horizontal and were too high for Amelia and Lydia to look at on their own. In that area I tried to get Elliott to be interested at least by handing him our camera and telling him to take pictures of his favorite stones. Lydia was in no mood to be doing any museums at all, so I had to watch her and slip her snacks when the guards weren’t looking. And Amelia wanted to be in different rooms all the time so Rachel had to watch her and everybody was getting hungry and grumpy and generally it was, as I said, a bust. However the kids did really enjoy seeing a moving animatronic dinosaur, and that's all they really remember from the museum. We went home and had some lunch and then came back to the city again. Once back in the city for the afternoon we walked past the Spanish riding school that we had heard so much about at Schonbrunn Palace, and Amelia was excited to make a connection with Princess Sisi who rode there so much. We also visited the Imperial Treasury (the Kaiserliche Schatzkammer), which I insisted on, having visited there when I was coming back from Egypt. To my dismay, the kids were not interested at all after we got through the first room or two because they just couldn't imagine that looking at intricately woven robes and jewel encrusted everything would be interesting. So I took all of them out of the museum myself without going through much of it. I entertained them with a fountain while Rachel finished looking at everything in a more measured pace so that she could really enjoy it. I let each of the kids choose a postcard to buy for one euro in the gift shop. Elliott chose one that had Charlemagne's crown on it, and Amelia chose one that had a picture of princess Sisi. I saw a few things that I would like to buy for Rachel, but I wanted to make sure I got the one she liked most, so when she came out I sent herback in to look at the things that I thought she would like, and she settled on a pair of earrings that looked like the stars that Sisi wore in her hair in the painting Amelia liked most. That evening we ate at another restaurant there in town. I just can't really remember anything about it.
The next day was 30 June. We took the metro all the way north to a bus stop and then took a bus up into the hills near Vienna in an area called Kahlenberg. There was a great overlook that allowed us to look down the city, and then we hiked on some trails through the green, green woods. We had our lunch at the top of some stairs above a fountain near where we got off the bus, and I really enjoyed the mustard we had purchased at Aldi during our first shopping trip there, a brand of Dijon mustard called Reine de Dijon. After our usual afternoon siesta to allow Rachel to do her homework and let the kids get some naps, we went out and enjoyed the Parks across the river again.
On July 1, for Elliott’s birthday, we went to the Prater, a sort of permanent state fair with free entry, and you just pay for each of the rides individually. As part of our tourist booklet, we received a bunch of coupons for it, and we were able to find enough rides that allowed small kids to go on them to satisfy the kids. Everybody had a great time. In the evening, we thawed a frozen cake from the grocery store and celebrated Elliott’s birthday.
On the morning of July second, we just visited our usual parks some more (Rudolfsplatz and Hermann-Gmeiner Park) and then in the afternoon we went back to Schonbrunn to see the kindermuseum there. What we thought was the only room turned out to be just the first room, which was a good thing because the older two kids didn't enjoy anything in the room. It had a bunch of costumes that you could wear to dress up like Sisi, which we thought Amelia would love, but she was too shy around all the other people there, and she didn't want anyone to see her in costumes. Elliott thought the whole idea of dressing up was ridiculous. The second area was a long hallway that got Elliott interested with a sort of scavenger hunt, but Amelia still wasn't enjoying it. Fortunately the third area was a room with some stairs the kids could explore under and the sort of museum mascot was a ghost who lived in the castle under those stairs. That room also had a slide and several models of the palace and churches in town that the kids could make out of blocks. The next few rooms were also interesting as they showed what life was like as a royal child. The kids especially enjoyed the kitchen room, the toy room, and the dining room, which had so much fake plastic food and fancy looking table settings that they were able to create a whole feast for us on the big dining table there. The room also included a model of Schonbrunn Palace made entirely of chocolate.
The next day was the Sabbath again, but this time it was raining. Since we were stuck inside the apartment that morning, I used the box from Elliott’s birthday cake to make a paper doll set of the apartment with our whole family in it. It was a big hit with the kids. We also decided to take the train to church this time, which was a much better decision. We bought tickets the night before so that we wouldn't be spending money on the Sabbath, and then we just activated them each time we got onto the trains for the rest of our stay in Vienna. Elliott and Amelia really enjoyed church, and Lydia surprised us both Sabbaths by doing just great in nursery with strangers.
We traveled on Monday, the Fourth of July, but not until we had another chance to visit our favorite parks across the river, especially the one with the zip line. Then we got on the train and headed to Salzburg. This time I went ahead in advance to reserve our seats on the train for a fee, and I made sure that we got in a car that had air conditioning. It was a much more pleasant trip.
Salzburg
We arrived in Salzburg In the early afternoon. We had a kind of tricky time finding the apartment because the numbering system on the road we were supposed to find it on was a bit confusing. Also there were no street signs visible from the front of the train station, despite the fact that we were told to look for them by the person whose apartment we were looking for. So it took us about a half an hour to find the place even though it was only a five-minute walk from the station. We weren’t technically allowed to check in until something like 5 o'clock or 3 o'clock, but we were allowed to drop off our luggage. So we climbed 4 flights of stairs to leave it there while the house keeper finished cleaning up the place. Then we went out to find a park (Lehener park) we had seen on the map. We walked along the river and crossed it at the first bridge we found, and then walked back up again until we found the park. As it turned out, there was a footbridge crossing the river almost exactly parallel with our house and the park, so we didn’t have to walk down and up again, but live and learn. The park had a large, heavy turntable about 2 feet off the ground; a long, narrow, floppy rubber mat strung between two walls with a roller in the middle of it that let me jump on one side and bounce the kids up on the other side, which they loved; a climbing structure made of tree trunks sort of haphazardly bolted together; and a little tiny stream trickling down a hill. We all had fun playing and enjoyed looking up into the hills around Salzburg and guessing where Maria's convent might've been and various other things from “The Sound of Music.” Rachel had the kids watch it before we left, and all three sat through the whole thing. We were amazed that they even paid attention to it. But as Rachel predicted, it made our visit to Salzburg much more meaningful to them. We shopped and had dinner at home that evening. The apartment was on the fourth floor of a building above a pizza shop just south of a very seedy part of town. It was also right next door to a jazz club (Jazzit:Musik:club) with a dinner garden out back, so the smoke from the diners always wafted up through our windows. But we could hardly bear to close the windows because the apartment got so hot thanks to the sun shining straight through the enormous windows on the west side of our apartment every evening. There were no curtains to speak of, only sheer drapes, so every evening I had a routine of putting up blankets and pillow cases and sheets over the windows in an effort to darken the room a bit. We planned to go to Lake Konigsee the day after we arrived, so Rachel and I spent most of the evening after the kids went to bed planning a trip and doublechecking all the details to make sure we would be successful getting there on time and having a full day.
On Tuesday early morning, we got a direct bus from the bus station for nearly an hour to get to Königssee. We had to cross into Germany a little bit because the lake is actually in Germany and not in Austria. The little town around Königssee was hardly more than a long street of shops for tourists, but it is a delightful place to explore. The lake itself is emerald green and pristine. We couldn't have chosen a hotter day, although we had anticipated it being much cooler up in the mountains and brought all our jackets along. The shores along the lake are mostly inaccessible because the mountain runs straight down into the lake. So the tour boats that we rode were almost the only things out in the water. The vistas changed gradually as we puttered along the long glacial lake, and every time I turned around the view behind me was more beautiful than the one in front of me! So it was quite a beautiful trip. At one point the boat stopped and turned off its electric motor so that a man with a trumpet could play a traditional song one line at a time so that we could hear the crystal clear echo come back two seconds later. I think it was probably Rachel's favorite day of the whole trip. We got tickets that stopped only halfway up the lake, where a little chapel (St. Bartholomew’s) and a small collection of restored houses was. We knew that we could go all the way to the end of the lake and do some hiking to see a beautiful waterfall about an hour past the landing, but we knew the kids could never make it. Even the small 15 minute hike that we attempted with them from the church up to Eisgraben river resulted in so much whining and moaning and complaining that we almost turned back several times. However, we were glad that we took them up for that little hike because we found a small waterfall next to a tiny chapel, and the kids threw lots of rocks into the river off of the bridge to cross at that point. After we returned to the dock, we stopped at a shop and I let each of the kids pick one locally quarried semi-precious gemstone for one euro each. I spent a little extra time choosing mine, because I couldn't decide between getting a quartz or an amethyst until I found one that was half and half! So I bought that. Elliott chose a bluish green stone almost the color of the lake, while Lydia chose a very darkly translucent reddish purple stone, and Amelia chose a nice piece of rose quartz. Rachel declined to buy anything. We stopped at a McDonald's to buy some Big Macs because there were coupons for a “buy one get one free” deal on the back of our boat tickets. Unfortunately we took so long at the McDonald's that we missed the bus we wanted to take to the Salzbergwerk Berchtesgaden salt mine. That meant we had to spend another hour in that little tourist trap waiting for the next bus to come. But we made it in time to go through the whole mine, and that was another excellent highlight of our trip. We all got to wear full-body jumpsuits, ride a straddle train through tunnels just barely big enough for the train to go through, ride down wooden straddle slides even deeper Into the mine, see a little grotto of rose-colored salt lit from behind by lights, cross a subterranean lake in a little skiff while watching a light show, hear about a brass pump that worked for 150 years without breaking down even once, and learn all about how they extract salt by flooding the salt chambers with water and pumping out the brine. Somewhere along the journey, Elliott lost his blue rock and was devastated. But we had so little time left to get the bus back to Königssee to catch our bus home that we couldn't spare any time to look for it. They wouldn't have let us go back into the mine anyway. Just before 9 o'clock, a storm reached Salzburg and it quickly turned into hail. Almost every night in Salzburg, Rachel did some laundry in the bathtub, because the person who rented us the apartment to us wouldn't let us use the washer and dryer in it. This was probably Rachel's least favorite aspect of the trip.
On the morning of the 6th, we took the kids to the Mirabell and explored the gardens behind it where the “Do re mi” scene was recorded for 'The Sound of Music.” While Rachel and the kids found a playground to enjoy behind those gardens, I went across the river to explore the old town. I had it in my head that I could find a replacement rock for Elliott’s lost blue rock and I wanted to surprise him with it. So I figured I could go to the natural history museum gift shop. Unfortunately, I went to the cathedral museum thinking that the natural history museum would be right next to it. But it turned out to be much further north in the old town, so I really had to hurry in order to get that stone and get back to the park by the time that I had promised to return. Still, I got the stone and brought it back to Elliott, and he was very pleased. It was delightful to walk through the old town and see the old buildings, some of which had stood since the 13th century. Unfortunately, there was a lot of road construction going on, so what I imagine would have been quiet sounds of chatter and Mozart drifting down the alleyways was replaced by the oh-so-familiar sound of jackhammers and the scent of diesel exhaust. Back at the Mirabell Palace with the family, we went inside to explore a little bit and found a marble performance room where Mozart often performed. It had wonderful acoustics. We all sing a song or two together there before we left. Outside the Mirabell was an old gnarled tree that was still alive despite laying almost on its side, and the kids really wanted to climb on that. I was tired and grumpy and wanted to go home, but we let them stay and play for a bit longer there. I can't remember what we did that afternoon, probably just some grocery shopping and playing at a park. But in the evening I encouraged Rachel to go explore the old city by herself, which she did and enjoyed. Having had the experience of exploring foreign cities on my own a little bit during college and on my mission, I knew that it had a much different feeling from trying to explore the cities with kids, and I wanted her to experience that. Our trip would have been so different if we had gone without kids! But of course we could not have afforded it before we had children. We will just have to make sure we can go back to Europe after our kids move out and before we get so old that we can't enjoy it anymore.
The next day (the 7th) was our trip to the zoo south of Salzburg at Schloss Hellbrunn, which had gardens that included the gazebo from the sound of music and a series of trick fountains that we saw on a guided tour. The zoo was unlike any zoo we have been to before, because it was built right against a cliff, and the animals were given much more space to roam up and down the cliff and through different natural habitats. We especially liked eating our lunch next to the rhinoceros enclosure with a giant mountain in the background. If it weren't for the fence separating us from them, we would have felt like we were sitting somewhere in Africa because there was no other signs of civilization around, and the rhinoceroses had such a natural and large area to roam in. After the zoo, Rachel took the kids to a very nice playground on the palace grounds that was open to the public, as were most of the grounds around the palace. Meanwhile, I walked up the mountain to the folklore museum where I was really interested to discover that the traditional Austrian outfit of lederhosen and a leather vest for the men and that dirndl outfit for the women, while certainly traditional, was actually declared the official Austrian garb in response to the Nazi invasion. It was their way of expressing their Austrian nationality, and the government even published a guide of how people should dress if they wanted to declare that they were Austrian. After seeing that museum, I also walked across the top of the hill and discovered a stone theatre that had been carved right out of the sandstone of the mountain. It was beautiful, and I would love to see a performance staged there. Then I walked around and down the back of the mountain along a tree-lined path back to the playground. Before going inside the palace, we visited the trick fountains, which were full of water-animated little statues, unexpected spits of water that would squirt you when you weren't looking, and generally all sorts of things that made Elliott hate it because he didn't want to be wet. Fortunately Amelia and Lydia were better sports about it, and I think everyone was having a good time by the end. The schloss itself was okay, though a bit underwhelming compared to others we had visited. We took the bus home again, had dinner at home, and then planned our next day while the kids resisted going to bed.
The next day (July 8th) started with a visit to Mozart's birth house, outside of which there was a little park that we played in with the kids. Lydia was simply intolerable in that museum, so that we barely made it through the first room before they she was fighting and whining and complaining so much that I had to just take her out. I walked quickly through the rest of the museum and saw what I wanted to so that Rachel could enjoy the museum at her own pace, since she was the one who really wanted to go in the first place. I told her I would take the kids to the toy museum and she could find us there. The toy museum was nice, with all the Brio trains the kids could imagine, as well as several large train sets behind glass that they could activate. There were also lots of other toys that they weren't allowed to touch, but there was one nice area that had a bunch of stuffed animals they could play with where they could buy and sell plastic food with each other. Since the kids’ behavior was a bit much for me that morning, and since I was convinced that they would never be able to enjoy the big museum at the cathedral in the afternoon, instead I bought a ticket for each of them and Rachel to cruise on the river in a boat after they had played for some time in the pyramid park behind the Mirabell gardens. While they went on the boat trip, I visited the museum. This worked out very well. We met that evening at a restaurant in the Mozartplatz and had a delicious albeit expensive dinner there. Amelia was smitten with the tiny flower that was used to garnish her meal, so she wore it behind her ear all the way home.
I should mention at this point that Lydia could barely put together two words when we left Doha. However, throughout the trip, her language developed a lot, and she started putting together longer sentences. She was extremely excited every time she saw a dog or a boat. Her word for dog was (and still is) “gog”, which is unfortunately exactly the same as her word for “God.” This comes up every time she wants us to sing her favorite children's hymn, I am a child of God, which she calls “Iagog.” She would often lay down when tired and say “Iagog” in a cute sing-songy voice to request that we sing it to her. Other favorites included the itsy bitsy spider, “I am Like a Star Shining Brightly”, and “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam.” She also started saying “Oopees!” instead of oopsie, which I’ll admit I can’t get enough of.
Both Rachel and I got to see all we wanted of the cathedral and the attached museums because the next morning (July 9) I took the kids so she could go. I took the kids down to Untersberg Mountain where we rode the cable cars up to the top. It was very cold and windy up there, but beautiful. We had a great view, and the kids were thrilled to be in the clouds that kept scudding through and spritzing rain and mist on us. In the cable car, Lydia kept saying “boat! boat! boat! boat!” We also finally found our first edelweiss there at the top of the mountain. In the afternoon we took the funicular up to the Hohensalzburg fortress which provided a fantastic view of the city. We were amazed by the amount of buildings up there at the fortress; it was practically a whole other town. We were a bit disappointed by the museum, though, because it focused all on modern war and very little on any ancient or medieval armor or lifestyles.
On Sunday morning, we visited all the churches we could around the old town, because we knew that services at the LDS chapel would be only in German. So we had our own little service in our apartment, authorized by our bishop, and the kids behaved very very well in all the churches that we visited. One of my favorite stops that morning was the Benedictine monastery which had a functioning waterwheel attached to the bakery so that they could grind flour. There had been an exhibit on the Benedictine monks at the museum the previous day, and I was fascinated by them so much that for the next week I read all I could about what modern life is like in monasteries and convents. The St. Blasius church was, in my opinion, the prettiest church on the outside all covered in ivy, while the Holy Trinity church was nicest on the inside. Just after visiting that church, we were treated to music from a marching band all dressed in traditional Austrian clothes. We happened to be in town for a week-long festival of folk music, so everywhere we walked we saw people playing folk music and singing songs and all dressed in their traditional costumes. We couldn't have timed it better! It made me want to move to Austria and join one of their men's choirs. We finished our morning at the Pyramid Park behind the Mirabelle again, because the kids loved it so much. It had two fun giant swings, a 3-story-high slide, and plenty of other things to entertain the little ones. We spent the afternoon in our apartment and visiting the Lehener park across the river. In the evening, we made all our final preparations for the next day's big trip to Neuschwanstein. But what's that they always say about the best-laid plans of mice and men?
The plan was to take the train from Salzburg to Füssen and leave all our luggage in the train station there so that we could pick it up after our tour and continue on to Nurnberg. But when we got almost to Füssen the train stopped and we were told to get off. The conductor informed us that the Füssen train station was closed and the rest of the journey would be completed by bus. So we took the bus to the station, and just as they said it was closed and completely under renovation, entirely nonfunctional, and completely fenced off. So Rachel and the kids had lunch in a park right by the train station while I wandered off with all of our luggage to find a hotel that might let us keep our luggage there. Fortunately, the first one I came to allowed us to store it there for a nominal fee, and we were able to catch the bus up to Hohenschwangau at the time we originally planned. When we arrived there it was, like most of our trip, unpleasantly hot and sunny. So Rachel and the kids found what shade they could while I picked up our reserved tickets. We had to pick them up two hours before the first part of our tour, which I find utterly absurd, especially since it meant we needed to entertain the kids for two hours before we got to do anything that we actually want to do. And then, according to our tickets, we would not even make it into Neuschwanstein castle until 4:30, even though we picked up the tickets at 11. So we hiked up the hill to Hohenschwangau castle (because they won't let you tour Neuschwanstein unless you have toured Hohenschwangau, and they won't let you tour Neuschwanstein first). Hohenschwangau was painted a gaudy yellow color, so it didn't look very attractive on the outside, but inside it truly was beautiful. The intricacy of the woodwork, the incredibly detailed statuary, the gorgeous paintings, and the perfectly preserved state of it all made me glad we had visited after all. Afterward we had another gap of two hours before we could tour Neuschwanstein, so we walked the long way down from Hohenschwangau, had a bathroom break down in that little town, and then forked out the cash to take the bus up above Neuschwanstein. From there we walked another 10 minutes down to the castle. Neuschwanstein was everything we hoped it would be: truly a fairytale castle as it didn't really represent any reality of how people lived in the Middle Ages, just a more expensive version of Disney, that is, someone's romanticized idea of what a castle should look like. Still, it was beautiful, and it was very interesting to see how a wealthy person lived at the end of the 19th century even if we weren't seeing how someone lived in the Middle Ages. The kids were very well behaved in both castles, and I think they enjoyed it as much as Rachel and I did. The fact that we were slipping them candy as we went through to keep them satisfied just as we did at Alhambra in a previous year probably had something to do that! We again took the long way down and then had to jostle our way onto a totally packed bus as it was the last bus going back to the train station for that evening. We had gotten back to Hohenschwangau just barely in time to escape a torrential downpour. Fortunately we all made it under the shelter soon enough for the kids and Rachel to stay dry, but I had to venture out in it to buy us our bratwurst dinner. We caught the bus back to the train station past some stereotypical half-timbered German and Austrian homes, and then we ate the bratwurst on the train. The bus that took us to the ersatz train station was packed, and the train itself was packed, at least until we made the transition past a certain point where a lot of people got off and we went on the rest of our way to Nürnberg, with the kids watching movies the whole way instead of falling asleep. We arrived very late at night, or perhaps early in the morning. Amelia was in full shutdown disaster mode screaming that she was tired and she couldn’t walk another step without peeing herself as we walked through a very dreary, dirty, and unattractive part of town just outside the train station to the A&O hostel/hotel where we had our reservation (she made it to the bathroom, by the way). We settled into a very cramped room and then the kids woke up early the next morning and we had a bit of a slow start to our first day there in Nurnberg.
By the time we left Salzburg, I was pretty much done with the whole vacation emotionally. I had told Rachel as much, and I'm sure the kids could tell by the number of times I had lost my temper. When my first impression of Nürnberg was a place that looked a lot like Cleveland, I didn't have high hopes for the city, so Rachel suggested that we cut short our stay in Nürnberg and go spend some extra time with my parents instead. When I sent them an e-mail asking if that would be okay, Mom told me we could come right away if we wanted to. We discussed it and decided to stay for two more days, but that we would check out a few days earlier than planned to go to Frankfurt.
We were entitled to an all you can eat buffet breakfast each morning we were there, which was nice, and there was a little play area for the kids there as long as we were eating. The kids enjoyed that, and we enjoyed all you can eat food, which we did each morning as late as we could so that it would last the kids until lunchtime. The hotel/hostel itself was much closer to the hostel end of the hotel/hostel spectrum, as we were there the same time as two large school groups for teenagers who liked to stay up late at night and play football in the hallway. There was very little air conditioning, and it was extremely hot, so we had difficulty going to bed and staying asleep at night with all the sounds coming in through the open window.
On Google Maps, we could see that there was a large park nearby just south of the Pegnitz river (the Wöhrder Wiese) and north of our hotel by about a kilometer, but we couldn't tell if it had any playground equipment. So we decided to visit it in the morning. It turned out to have a very nice little playground for the kids right across the fields from a surprisingly high ropes course playground that Elliott was very interested in. He was extremely brave and allowed me to help him up to the 15-foot high nest-like net at the end of it. That afternoon and evening we went shopping and bought some cheap food on our way back to our hotel room where we had dinner. Then I took the kids on a walk just to get them out of the hotel, and we ended up spending the evening at a toy store in the mall that had a LEGO table they could build on. On the way home, Amelia had another bathroom emergency and we had to stop in an Indian restaurant so she could go. Since she went in the women’s restroom, I couldn’t go in to help her, and she couldn’t make the water turn on to wash her hands, so she had another meltdown. I ended up carrying her over my shoulder like a sack of potatos just to get her home.
On the 13th, we went directly to Nürnberg Cathedral, which was unfortunately not very impressive in the way of stained-glass because of the war, but was still very beautiful. We also happens to be there when the organist was practicing, so we got to hear the excellent acoustics of it. We then stopped at the mall again to see what the LEGO prices were because we thought we might get some stuff for the kids’ birthdays and Christmas while we were there. They had the biggest LEGO section we had ever seen, plus a whole section of Sylvania Family toys that Amelia was immediately enamored with. We decided not to buy anything at that store though, because we figured we'd be able to find anything in Frankfurt that we could see there. That turned out to be the right choice because we found the set we wanted for Elliot at a lower price in Frankfurt than they had in Nürnberg. We had planned to walk through the old city after lunch, but the kids were grumpy and we knew they wouldn't be able to tolerate that much walking, so Rachel took them to the park, and I decided to walk the suggested route that all the tourist signs had indicated would show us the best parts of the old city on the way to the castle. As soon as I left Rachel and the kids, it started to rain, not just a little rain, but a full downpour. It didn't let up until I got home over 2 hours later. But I was determined to see something of the city despite the rain, so I walked for a full two hours in the driving rain seeing everything I could, and I walked that whole tourist route. It finally stopped raining on my way back down the hill toward the hotel, but by that time I was so cold that I couldn't stop my teeth chattering the entire way. One of the neatest unexpected discoveries on my route actually came when I went a little bit off of the route to see the city wall. A portion of the wall that went over the river had been converted into a college dormitory, but I didn't realize it until I was inside the building trying to use it as a covered bridge to get across the river. I can't imagine a cooler dormitory to live in! I saw the St. Sebaldus church; the street that miraculously escaped a bombing during World War II so that the original houses were still standing and were still in good repair there; the home of Albrecht Durer; and the truly imposing and unbelievably thick-walled castle at the top of the hill. That evening we ate dinner in the hotel, and then I took Elliott down to the lobby so that he could watch the trolleys go by while I read a book. It was while watching those trolleys that he came up with an allegory for life, saying that everyone's life is like a train, and each car on the train has the number of the year of that person's life like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Each seat on the train is a memorable day from that year, etc. And he just came up with all this off the top of his head while watching the trolleys go by. It was delightful to hear. The next morning we went back to the train station to catch the ICE train to Frankfurt. The kids were disappointed that it wasn't actually made out of ice. But it certainly was fast, and we enjoyed the scenery on the trip.
My parents were waiting for us when we arrived around 11:00. Mom took Rachel and the kids to lunch and to walk around a shopping mall, while Dad and I took the luggage back to the apartment. He bought me a delicious doner for lunch, and I helped him create a PowerPoint presentation in which he used popular music from the 50s, 60s, and 70s to teach gospel principles. I also taught him to get photos from his iPhone onto his computer. I think Rachel and I used that evening to go shopping at the toy store in Frankfurt where we bought a LEGO train for Elliott and some little toys for Lydia's birthday party. Mom and Dad entertained the kids in the apartment for us. The next morning we all went to the park nearby that had the zip line (Ami Spielsplatz). Then we came home for lunch and spent the rest of the day playing with LEGOs and relaxing in the apartment on Porthstrasse.
On the 16th, we drove what should have been two hours but ended up being a four-hour drive to Rothenberg ob der Tauber, thanks to all the holiday traffic. Rothenberg seems like the kind of place that I would have loved to take Rachel on our honeymoon. It could be a self-contained vacation all in itself. It’s a quaint, beautiful old town surrounded by the oldest city wall in Germany probably, which they have restored to the point that you can walk around the entire city on the wall. After seeing many of the sights together, Rachel and I asked Mom and Dad if we could go walking on our own while they watch the kids at the playground down in the ditch where the city’s moat used to be. They agreed, and Rachel and I walked around holding hands for an hour enjoying the relative peace and tranquility of having no children around. The drive home was mercifully only two hours.
Sunday morning we all played with LEGOs, and then the kids went on a walk with mom to the graveyard until lunchtime. Afterward, we all headed to church. After church we had dinner prepared by mom, but when her friend Elsi came (the same Elsi Mom had described as the “German Aunt Shirley), she brought an entire meal herself, consisting of potato dumplings called Klosesse and a heavy meat gravy. It was absolutely delicious, and I like to think I saved Mom some troubled by eating her share of the food.
On the 18th, Rachael and I got up early and traveled to Baden-Baden while mom took the kids to a refugee camp to play with the children there. Baden-Baden was a little confusing at first, because the train station is actually outside the part of town that everyone wants to see, and quite far from where we wanted to hike in the Black Forest outside town. So we did a lot of extra walking, even considering the fact that we had planned to walk the whole day. We saw the beautiful and very touristy town itself and then made our way up into the hills to walk along he Panoramaweg. We had read online that this path had been voted the very most beautiful one in all of Germany, so we thought we should give it a try, at least as much of the 35 km as we could. Just when we finally found the trail itself, we decided we should eat lunch, so we sat at the top of a beautiful meadow and enjoyed the cool breeze in the shade while we ate our sandwiches. Our best discovery of the day was the Altes Schloss (high castle) that had been inhabited at one point by St. Bernhard. Rachel said that castle alone made the entire trip worth it, and I had to agree. I'm sure there are other castles throughout Europe that are ruined in the same very romantic way as that one, but we hadn't seen them, and this was the only one that we were able to visit without a tour guide and just imagine for ourselves what it would have been like to live there. We then took a long hike around the sandstone cliffs in that area, which is a protected national park called Battertfelsen beim Schloß Hohenbaden, and then headed north on the Panoramaweg trail until we ran back into town. At that point Rachel was done walking so we had a snack at the St. Bernard church. Then we walked back down into the heart of town for an early dinner at a café and caught the bus back to the train station. The train got us home in time to put the kids to bed.
The next morning I was exhausted, and I just needed a break from all touristy stuff, so I stayed in the apartment with Lydia while everybody else went on a bike ride. That afternoon we all played LEGO some more and relaxed.
We spent the 20th at Lochmuhle amusement park, a family-run park just right for kids our kids' age. Most of the rides were operated not by park staff but by the riders themselves, pushing a start button, pulling a rope or lever to activate the ride, or even powering it themselves. I was amazed at how much of a thrillseeker Elliot and Amelia were that day, basically trying every ride they were allowed to by the weight and height restrictions. In the evening we had a joint birthday party for Elliott and Lydia using an ice cream cake that I had purchased as the convenient store downstairs in my parents’ apartment building.
Starting on the 21st, Mom watched the kids while Rachel, Dad and I drove to the Netherlands to visit our friends the Garretts in Moordrecht; attend the Hague temple; tour the MC Escher museum; ride our bikes on a beautiful path between Gouda (pronounced khowda) and Schoonhoven to see some windmills, and generally relax without kids. It was probably my favorite part of the whole trip. The Garretts were incredibly hospitable to us, having waited up late to share their dinner with us, and putting a whole vase of probably two dozen full-grown sunflowers fresh cut to welcome us. They were excellent hosts. Then we drove to France where we stayed overnight in a really cheap hotel before visiting to refugee camps, one where we only visited the warehouse and dropped off a food shipment, and the other where we tried to find someone that Dad needed to talk to to complete the purchase of a log splitter. I really enjoyed going to the grocery store with a wad of cash to buy all the fresh produce that the warehouse kitchen had requested, which was a small amount in the big picture when you consider that the kitchen at that warehouse feeds a thousand people every day. We also spent some time there checking the quality of donated bags, backpacks, and suitcases, and sorting them according to size. The entire community of volunteers that have been built up in the warehouse was quite an amazing thing to behold, as they have developed all sorts of social contracts and rules that made working together easier when you have new people coming and going all the time. The amount of goodwill between people there was pretty high, but given the chaos of the situation, it would have to be if they wanted to get anything done. Again, we got back home on the 23rd in time to put the kids to bed, which was getting harder and harder for Lydia as our trip went on. Many nights, she didn't go to bed until at least 10 or 11, and only after enormous amounts of screaming. As I said before, I was already to be done, and I think Lydia was telling us that she was ready, too.
On the 24th, we all went walking in the cemetery nearby, the same one that we had visited the first time we met my parents in Frankfurt two years ago, and Lydia was wearing the very same jacket that Amelia had worn that first time.
