Heidleberg

When Dustin sent me the text informing me that he had to travel to Germany for work, I made a little joke about tagging along. The trip was in under 2 weeks and if you know *me* at all, traveling last minute is not my thing, especially internationally. All the talk of where to stay, who would watch the kids, flight times and lengths of layovers. . .  However, Dustin got it in his head that I was coming and if you know *Dustin* at all, whatever he wants to happen will happen. I'm a giant push over. By the time Dustin and I finally were in the same house at the same time to talk about the trip it was exactly one week before he was suppose to leave.  Who knows what magically happened but I changed my mind, called my sister to see if she would still be cool with flying in and bought my ticket.  Well actually, we bought tickets to the beach, tickets to Germany, tickets to France and tickets for my sister and her girls to fly down here all within 24 hours which meant our credit card called due to fraud alert.

 GUSH ALERT!! My sister is the best.  She's part of the reason I even went. Even though she was a little stressed out at the thought of taking care of 6 kids for a week by herself, she still totally encouraged me to go and have fun. I'm so lucky to have the best sister in the world!!  We both love traveling and I can't wait to go somewhere together (now that I'm not a teenager who can't be bothered to admit she's enjoying a family vacation).  And to return the favor with her kids. Of course I will plan on not being deathly ill with the flu when I do it.

First we flew into Frankfurt (traveling without kids is the best), got our rental car (a small SUV -- I'm pretty sure Germans think all Americans only drive SUVs) and drove off to Heidelberg Germany. I made Dustin keep it under 100 mph on the autobahn.  When we landed it was actually 10 at night in Arizona, but only 7 am in Germany, so we had no choice but to hit the ground running.

Right when you pull into Heidelberg, you can see the castle towering overhead, so we decided to visit there first. The hotel insisted that we would not be able to walk all the way to the castle (another misconception because it was only 2 miles away), so we bought tram tickets and headed to Old Town.

 

Old Town is just what you would picture a little village city to look like: cobblestone streets, open air cafes, shops, centuries old churches and plazas. We had lunch and just took the views in -- my apologies to the poor German couple that is now part of all my vacation memories in not the most flattering of poses. It was kind of funny to see shops like H&M and TK Maxx (yes, TK) in these gorgeous old buildings.

We hiked up to the castle and wandered around.

 

There was a little apothecary museum, some dueling was going on, gorgeous grounds and the biggest wine barrel I've ever seen.  Technically it's the biggest wine barrel anyone has ever seen since it's the largest in the world, holding 55,345 gallons of wine.

For dinner we had Thai food, tried to find some good dessert and collapsed into bed. The next two days were bliss.  I felt like I was on a real vacation!  Dustin had meetings so I was left to my own devices, which actually worried me less before we left since I was confident my rusty German would be enough to get me around. Of course then we got to Germany and it's like I suddenly forgot everything I had ever used.

I slept in until after 8, when Dustin would bring me breakfast in bed before he headed out.  Then I'd read, go for a run, come back and shower (yes, I showered and did my hair every.single.day) and then do whatever sounded fun.  I wandered around looking for a grocery store (the hotel once again insisted that I could never walk to the store 10 minutes away, so why didn't I buy Kinder eggs at the gas station?), read a book along the river, took a nap. . . One night we met up with all of Dustin's colleagues from all over Europe and the States for dinner.

By far my greatest adventure was the Philospher's Walk. It starts off as a scenic walk overlooking the river and city but there are little paths up the hill to a few more landmarks.  The problem is, the paths all crisscross and there's no easy way up to the top of the hill. The routes are all tiny little trails through the forest and I was by myself trying to follow arrows and directions chiseled into stones along the way.

One path I was suppose to take was actually marked as closed and so I went way out of my way, ended up on the main road and had to back track.  All in all I spent a good 3 hours hiking around.

I found everything I wanted though! Thingstatte is an open-air amphitheater built by the Nazis.

At the very top of the mountain are the remains of a monastery built in 870.

Finally on the way back down, I took a break to read my book and eat some food in the Philsopher's Garden before heading back to meet Dustin so we could head out to the airport.

 

When it was all said and done, I had walked 8 miles that day (and ran 4 that morning) so I totally deserved all the bread and cheese I ate.