Our first two full days in Paris were very busy with a lot of walking in big museums. Today, in contrast, we decided to take things a little more slowly and see a few things we wanted to see but that might be out of the main tourist spots. We started by slowly waking up […]
Today started with another quick and easy Uber ride — this time to the catacombs. We had purchased tickets in advance, but I’d read you still needed to be early because they only let 200 people into the catacombs system at a time. We were in line and waiting by 10:30 for our 11:00 tickets, […]
Today was our first full day in Paris, and I was working to balance everyone being rested and curious while still checking a few places off the sightseeing list every day. With a big list of things to see and do, I become energized and am ready to go. Mike does not like to adhere […]
This was our travel day to Paris, but before leaving Wuppertal, I just have to mention our hotel’s interesting setup. In the girls’ room, there was a glass mirror between the main room and the bathroom. From the bathroom, you could see into the main room, but from the main room, the glass was only […]
Today we slept in long enough to completely miss the hotel’s breakfast. Around 11:00, I walked to the corner and grabbed a sack of McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches. The girls slept even longer, and we were lucky to be up and moving in time for Sophia and Meltam to pick the girls up for a shopping […]
Wuppertal’s students were in school one last day before a six week break, and Elizabeth and Julia were invited to join Pinar for those last few hours. Sophia graduated a few weeks earlier, so she intended to join them later. While Mike and I slept in, Elizabeth and Julia grabbed breakfast in the hotel and […]
We were excited about today because we knew we would be in Wuppertal in the afternoon! We wanted to stop in Cologne, however, to check out the cathedral before moving on to Wuppertal. That meant leaving Boppard before the DHL office opened. We had to buy our own tickets using the kiosks instead of getting […]
We chose Boppard for our nights on the Rhine because we thought it would be a good ending stop to a castle tour. We wanted to do a loop: ride the train south and take a boat back north. It did work out well. Train tickets could be purchased at the local DHL store near […]
We had an early start in Rothenburg because today was a travel day with a lot of driving. Rothenburg to our next stop was a 3.5 hour drive. Once we were on the highway, the kids could obviously hear us debating the appropriate highway speeds. It was super cool that our car always had a […]
Today we were tourists of the highest level. We spent the whole day in Rothenberg ob der Tauber walking the streets, going in and out of little shops, and having no actual plan. We started by walking the walls of the city. Mike and Julia found the Medieval Punishment Museum and spent some time in […]
Today we were up early and decided to add an extra hour to our day’s travel to visit Auernheim, a small town where the Woelmers once lived before moving to America and settling in Michigan during the mid-1850’s. The original spelling of Woelmer was Wöllmer. It was changed when they immigrated to the U.S. We […]
Elie Wiesel died today, and today we visited Dachau. I’ve taught Wiesel’s short novel Night to high school sophomores,and my own children read it during middle school. As complicated and controversial as Wiesel’s life became, my primary connection comes from seeing young people who did not see themselves as readers approach the Holocaust for the […]
We had been spoiled with breakfast at our guest houses so far, so seeking out our own probably got us up and going a little earlier than we normally would. We did go back to the Viktualmarkt where we could choose food from dozens of small stores and market stalls. Mike and Julia had breakfast […]
Leaving Hallstatt was hard. We could have easily done another day here. It might just have been that our England segment of the trip was so busy, but finally slowing down was nice. We packed early and had breakfast (again, very good — I don’t think we have had a bad breakfast yet). Then we […]
June 29th is Mike’s birthday, and he chose Hallstatt for “his” stop on the trip. Hallstatt is a tiny town (less than a thousand people), but it has been an inhabited site for salt mining for almost 7000 years. In more “recent” times, an early Iron Age settlement was on the site from 800 to […]
Breakfast at Pension Ballwein was very different from the standard English breakfasts we’d had in the UK. Instead of fried up eggs, potatoes, bacon, sausage, and beans, here we ate lighter with breads, cheeses, sandwich meats, yogurt, granola, fruit, and olives. It was delicious, and we ate a lot. Our morning activity was Fraulein Maria’s […]
This is a quick write-up because it was all travel and very little sightseeing. It’s also never a fun day when the alarm goes off at 3:15 am. We are not morning people in general, and that was just way too early. Our plane from London to Salzburg was scheduled to leave Gatwick at 8 […]
We got a late start again, but we made it to the British Museum by 1:00. We could easily have spent days in there, so we knew we’d have to pick and choose. We started with the Rosetta Stone, the artifact that made it possible to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs. We spent most of our time […]
This morning’s breakfast was good ‘ole McDonald’s across from King’s Cross. We tried to go directly to the Tower of London, but we didn’t know to check the station construction maps. We were struggling with the Tube already, and the line that should have taken us was down for repairs for the whole weekend. Mike’s […]
After arriving around midnight, we only needed to walk across the street from St Pancras to our stay in London, the YHA hostel. I wanted to try a hostel, and the London location was a good place to try it out because I could sleep all four of us for under $100. We had a […]
