We had a range of hotel experiences in Germany. Mostly we looked for deals through Hotwire.com, and we found some pretty nice places near the areas of town we planned to visit for relatively low prices.
Our first hotel was in Frankfurt: the Best Western Hotel Plaza a few blocks south of the train station, just a street or two north of the Main river. The entry was, naturally, about five steps up from the street, so we had to make Elliott get out and climb the stairs, then carry the stroller with Amelia up the steps every time we came home. The place was nice and clean and convenient, but the breakfast was absurdly expensive, so we got food from a Rewe grocery store nearby.
Here's the view out our room's window.
Every time we went up or down the tiny elevator there, I would play a game with Elliott to help him ignore the fact that we took up the entire thing with barely room to wiggle (with our luggage we had to go in shifts). I'd sing a sort of techno-sounding song with the ingenious lyrics, "Dance in the elevator! Dance in the elevator! Dance dance dance dance!" and we'd do crazy dances until we felt it slowing, and then say "STOP!" and pretend we had just been standing quietly the whole time. One particularly considerate thing the hotel did was to post a reminder of the end of daylight savings Saturday night, which we had forgotten about completely. If not for that sign, we would have missed church!
There was not much space once we got Amelia's baby bed in there, and I and the kids got cabin fever pretty quickly, particularly when we spent several hours there Sunday afternoon.
In Koblenz, we stayed at the Mercure, located right on the Rhein next to the city offices. Now, I grew up in Amherst, where our town hall was pretty classy-looking, built out of local sandstone and not too bad to look at. Later I lived in Carthage, MO, which had a pretty nice courthouse right in the center of town, too. But I've got to say, Koblenz just knows how to do city office buildings right. Here's the view from our window. You can see the big fort up on the hill, too. The cable car that took us to it was just a few blocks north of us, too, so quite convenient.
And the view from the street.
The hotel was a lot nicer than we expected, and the people at the desk gave us more than a few weird looks when we came in and out on foot with the stroller and looking kind of haggard. But we got good service. Expensive breakfast and dinner again, so we got food from outside. I forgot my shopping bag, so I brought the food home in an extra box from the store. Also got weird looks for that, but Amelia liked it.
In Mainz, we booked a room through AirBNB.com which we'd heard advertised on NPR. We found a nice little flat just south of the Fischtorplatz with a bed in the living room and a small room for the kids, plus a kitchen and bathroom, located close to the old city and, again, right near the river. This is what the Fischtorplatz looks like.
And from there you could see straight to the Dom.
Everything about it was great except that the lady who owned it had to leave before we got there to pick up the key, and we didn't have email access to get her message saying so. So we spent a bit of money on international calling to the AirBNB customer service center, and they told us she left the key at a little kiosk store just opposite her flat. Unfortunately, after checking all the stores on the block, none of them knew about it. Meanwhile, it was freezing cold, getting dark, and Amelia had a leaky diaper. Finally, the customer service got her in touch with us. Turns out the kiosk store "just opposite her apartment" was actually a store named Kiosk, and it was about a block down the road without an obvious sign, not opposite her apartment. Oh, well. We appreciated the room, and it was a nice change, and it saved us money.
The next place we stayed was the Elite Hotel in Heidelberg right near where Bunsen of Bunsen Burner fame lived and worked. Rachel really wanted to stay somewhere with an old-timey feel, and this place fit the bill. Its rooms were actually located in several renovated houses on the same street, so we stayed in the building across the street from where we checked in. Here's the breakfast room where we only had to pay 6 euros per person for me and Rachel to eat breakfast, and the kids ate free.
Our final stay was at the LDS temple patron housing next to the temple in Friedrichsdorf, which is provided for church members who have traveled far from home to visit the temple. On the map linked above, the temple is the big building running north-south in the center, and the rooms we stayed in were at the west corner of the complex. They rented us a whole room with six bunks, fresh linen, towels, and a communal bathroom and kitchen. The kids loved it! It was very clean and relatively quiet. Hopefully our kids crying to sleep didn't disturb everybody in the other rooms.
Amelia had a hard time each night falling asleep as we slept somewhere new almost every other day. So that was the hardest part of staying in so many hotels. But overall, I'm glad we got to see so many places.
