Heidelberg

Since our husbands are in the field, the girls and I decided to keep ourselves busy for the next three weeks! I had never been to Heidelberg, and when I discovered it was a short two hours away from where we live, I proposed a day trip to the ladies. So last Thursday Misty, Kelly, Jenn & Addie, Hayden and I packed it up for a road trip! We carpooled and double checked for sunscreen, filled up with gas and hit the road around 8:30. We made good time, stopping once for an autobahn catch-up and feeding, and found the parking deck we wanted pretty easily. We vetoed the strollers since the main attraction in Heidelberg is the castle and we figured it wouldn't be stroller-friendly. Jenn and I strapped our babies into their front carriers and headed towards the castle. Unbeknownst to us, it was a grueling 303 steps to the entrance! But we'd come too far to let a thing like that stop us, and pushed on through it. We couldn't have asked for better weather, or a better group to be with!

We made it up to the top, stopped for a pretzel and a drink, and walked into the castle courtyard. We bought a small guidebook, vetoed the guided tour and checked it out on our own. We enjoyed the views of the city and the famous "old bridge" and did our best to read the signs in German. We went in search of the "great tun", a giant wine cask that attracts many visitors every year. We walked in and saw a huge barrel-like structure, and were impressed with its size. We had a nice waitress take our picture and continued our self-guided tour of the castle grounds. There was the german Apothecary Museum, the fountains and terraces, beautiful ruins and amazing views. It turned out to be an amazing city!

A little while later we headed back inside to share a glass of wine and feed the babies. Misty walked around for a few minutes and came back to report that what we THOUGHT was the great tun was, in fact, not the great tun. We walked into another room and were stunned at the sheer size of this wine cask. Constructed in 1751, it holds 58,000 gallons of wine and was made from 130 tree trunks. It's hard to convey the actual size of it, but it's 8.5 meters wide and 7 meters high and has a full size dance floor on its top. It is MASSIVE and we laughed all day about the "small one", which was still pretty big!

We vetoed a tour of the inside of the castle, which was an hour long and not baby friendly. We walked all around the gardens and enjoyed the beautiful weather. The babies did really well, dozing off here and there but overall they enjoyed the day too! There's an Army post in Heidelberg, so we made our way to the food court and checked out the PX. Since Misty, Jenn and Kelly are all my scrapbooking friends, we decided a visit to their craft store was in order. We were on our way to the other post to check it out, when Misty called. They had been in a fender bender, which was extremely unfortunate since Misty's car was less than a week old! They got rear ended at a stoplight, which put a damper on the trip. After two hours, the baby car had to head home, and Jenn and Misty were fine but didn't get to leave until almost 10pm! Jenn, the babies and I got home around 10pm, let Misty's dog out and made our way to our respective houses. After a full day of traveling, Hayden and I both were pretty worn out. Four hours with a 17-lb baby strapped to your chest plus driving four hours round trip will do that to you!

Aside from the unfortunate accident, we had a blast on our road trip and can't wait to go somewhere new! We have two more trips in the works for May, I'll let you know how they turn out!