Baden-Baden and Surprise!

The snow has been falling here in Bavaria pretty thickly which makes for interesting driving, fun in the snow, and lots of brownies. Here at the Melone house we're doing the last few loads of laundry so we can start packing to head out the door at 0300 (that's 3 am) on Monday morning to catch our flight. But! As I promised, I wanted to do a couple of more updates on the trips we've had. I realize that this has kinda become a travel blog, but I feel that it's appropriate because some of the things that we do--mainly the hiking--isn't talked about in any English travel book or website. Plus, I want to encourage everyone to take a trip to Europe and visit us in Germany sometime while we're here. So start saving to come and visit!

Baden-Baden
One Thursday mid-morning while Matt is at work, I get a text from him asking for the address of a hotel that we'll be staying at that weekend. Now, that's a completely normal request if you've talked about going on a trip and decided on a hotel, but we hadn't. That text was my notification that we had a 4-day weekend, so in about 3 minutes, after looking in a Rick Steves guide to Germany, I decided that this city called Baden-Baden (literally Baths-Baths) in the Black Forest sounded cool. I looked up on Venere.com some hotels, got the cheapest good-looking one, and sent that address. Yes, this is how our vacation planning usually goes.

So after I sent the address I did a little bit of research, trying to find out if we could hike through the Black Forest and such. Of course, there are loads of trails, but probably the coolest part of Baden-Baden is that it has two public baths. One is a modern "bath" where people walk around in bathing-suites and such, and the other is an Roman-Irish bath where people walk around without their bathing-suits. Well, according to Rick Steves, the nude bath was the awesomer of the two, so naturally, we decided, hesitantly, to do that one.

With this little bit of planning, we leave on Saturday morning for Baden-Baden, armed with my computer and our portable internet to make the final tweeks on our trip after we got there. We got to our hotel, which happened to be the 4-star Batschari Hotel for ridiculously cheap, and were so excited when we saw that it really WAS a 4-star hotel (unlike other "4-star" hotels)! The only hitch was that it was all under construction, but what did we care when our room was completely intact and came with an apologetic basket of fruit and bottle of Champagne? What a deal!

We spent the first evening in and got some good sleep. The next day we got our hiking clothes on and went to the information center to try and get a map of the trails. We saw a great map on the wall, and the same was for sale for only 2 EUR, but of course nobody was working the desk. So, I took a picture of the map and we used that as our guideline for the rest of the trip. We saw a picture of castle ruines on the map and decided that we'd try to make our way towards them.

On our way to the Information Center. Such an adorable little town!

This gorgeous building is the Tourist Information Center.

A gate along the way. You can imagine it in a Harry Potter movie where the flower might shrink back into itself to unlock the gate and open, and then grow again to lock it after you passed through.

Baden-Baden, because it is so close to the French border, has architecture that is more French than German. We enjoyed the change of pace as we walked through the city to get to the outskirts where the trails started.

A great time of year for a hike. We thought a medieval horse and carriage might come up that right trail at any moment.

The Castle Yburg ruins.

It got really windy and cold as we got to the top, so we just snapped a few pictures and started hiking back. After getting caught in the rain, and taking a much longer way back than we thought, we finally got back to our room, showered, and made our way to the baths.

The baths are absolutely wonderful. It's a 3-hour experience with about 18 different stages of showers, pools of all temperature, dry saunas, hot saunas, brush massages to slough the last 5 years of dead skin off, a lotion station, resting rooms (where it's dark, warm, and they wrap you in blankets!), and lastly, a reading room full of National Geographic magazines. Ah, it was so amazing and we just can't wait to get back. Oh, and about the nudity...everyone was completely normal. Though there were an unbalanced amount of overweight older men there. But everyone kept their eyes to themselves which made for a very peaceful and enjoyable experience.

Surprise!
So, I told you I had a surprise, and you might have already scrolled down far enough to see it, but with a new job, we need a new car. We looked around for a while, but all in all, with the incredible deals we get because we're military and in Europe, the best deal just seemed to be to buy a MINI Cooper for me. Woot! I am so uber excited and can't wait until it comes. I designed it on miniusa.com, and this is the graphic that it came up with:

My beautiful car!

It should be getting here sometime in February, so I'll be sure to post pictures when it gets here. Vroom Vroom!

Travels and Parties!

So...how's everyone doing? I hope great! And me? Well, let's just pretend I somehow was unable to get on blogger to post what's been going on these last couple of months. But now I'm back! I'll give you the quick and dirty right here: Matt's back, he's wonderful, we love to cook delicious things together, he'll likely be home for around two years before the next deployment, it's snowed a couple of times, my job starts January 19th (woot!), we'll be in Orlando from the 15th to the 26th, and then in San Francisco from the 26th to the 1st, we've had three overnight trips to different places, been to a few Christmas Markets (Weinachtmaerkte), we threw an early Christmas feast for our friends that are PCSing (moving) soon, a Thanksgiving feast for some of Matt's single friends, and a little surprise that I'm going to share later.

All of this is very interesting, but of course, the bits that require photos are the snow, trips, parties, and the surprise. Alas, somehow the pictures I took of the parties got lost. I have no idea and am in fact quite stumped as to where they could have gone, so at least for these parties you won't get to see the wonderful fun and decorations we had. And since there’s a lot of pictures, and stories to go with all of them, I’m going to split this up into a few posts so you don’t have as much to read all at once, and so I don’t go mad trying to organize a huge post.

Snow

Since our little town isn’t as exotic as, say, Cinderella’s castle, I decided to put these pictures first. The town is absolutely gorgeous when it’s all white, and it really feels like a winter wonderland here. The first day of the snow we went on a run (Jonathan, Trent & Nat, you know which one I’m talking about) and just felt like we were in a magical land. Honestly, I thought Mr. Tumnus would come running along any second with his packages and umbrella.

View from our upstairs window

Of course, the Glockenturm. All beautiful with snow!

Leuchtenberg
All overe Germany on the Autobahns, there are these brown attraction signs. Most of these signs describe something in the area that takes 10-30 minutes to get to. One in particular had caught my eye on my few trips to Prague. In the picture was this idyllic castle sitting on top of a hill. But more than that, after you saw the sign and thought it very idyllic, you would look to your left (if traveling east) and see exactly what was pictured on the sign. It was the proverbial City on a Hill! Luckily, I had my parents with me on one of these drives and she was able to write down the name of the place so I could go look it up later.

When Matt got back from Iraq, we got all excited about exploring and traveling, and I thought of this place and another castle as an easy trip because they're just about an hour away. So, we went off to visit Leuchtenberg (the "eu" in it is said like the "oi" in "oil," and the "ch" said like a "k," so it's said "LOIK-ten-berg").

View from right off the Autobahn 6.

We had to drive and walk around a little bit before it opened, but when it did, it was so much to walk around the inside. The castle is in ruins, not in a bad way, I just mean that some of the stories/floors are missing, and other than the chapel, all of the original roofs are gone. One part in particular that I enjoyed was that from the bolts you could see in the walls and ground, you could see that it was set up to host modern-day parties. Wouldn't it be great to have a cocktail party or benefit in a castle?

This is us at the top of the castle (see Matt's cool new leather jacket!)

Füssen, Neuschwanstein, etc.

Neuschwanstein has made it onto this blog before when I visited there with Jonathan and some of his friends, so I don't need to explain again the history of the castle. What is more relevant this time is simply that it is situated at the edge of the alps just a few miles from the Austrian border. Since we are likely going to visit this magnificent castle again when Matt's family comes to visit, instead of taking the tour of the castle, we decided to hike some of the mountains behind it.

The place to stay when visiting Neuschwanstein is Füssen, the town just a few minutes away from the castle. We got a great rate for a 4-star hotel called the Hotel Hirsch right in the middle of the town, and across the street from "old town." Füssen is really a beautiful town in and of itself, and had I known that to begin with we might have spent more time there, but we had a plan to go hiking. Since we couldn't really get a good map of the trails online or in Füssen, we decided to just go to the info center at the bottom of the castle and start asking questions.

View of Neuschwanstein in the Alps on the way to Hohenschwangau

So we got our camera, food, water, and started walking from Füssen to Hohenschwangau, where Neuschwanstein is located. When we got there and asked someone for a hiking map, they gave us a cartoon map that looked like it was designed to show ski slopes, i.e., absolutely awful for hiking because it's not to scale and doesn't show elevation or distances well. But, with that we were off!

Just outside the information center with the castle in the background

To get to the trails we went past the castle. You can even go inside the courtyard without paying any money.

I knew there were some trails on the other side of Marienbrücke, so we headed there with our cartoon map and looked for signs. We decided to take the trail that led to the highest peak in the area: Saüling (kinda reminds you of Sauron doesn't it?). At the trail haid the estimated time to get to the peak was 4 hours. Matt and I looked at each other, not expecting to do a hike like this when we started our day, but decided that it'd be fun. The first part of the trail was ridiculously easy: we just walked along a gravel road.

Gorgeous day for a hike. This was the only sun we got because for the rest of the hike we were on the north side of the mountain.

After about 45 minutes we paused to take a break, and we saw this guy walk past us, off the road, and upsome mucky trail. We just thought he was crazy until we got closer and realized that was our trail. So no more of this pansy road stuff, we started to hike up the muck and into the forest for real.

See what I'm pointing at?

This beautiful view is what I'm pointing at!

A couple hours into the hike. The town you see by the lake is a little closer than Füssen, from which we had walked that morning.

After about two and a half hours we encountered a ladder. We should have known at that point, and from looking at the rocks what would come after, but we didn't think about that. After the ladder everything was just scrambling upwards. You used your hands for almost every step and just kept going upwards. Since this was a lot more than we had bargained for it stopped being as much fun as the beginning. So instead of just pushing through for another 45 minutes or so of scrambling, we decided to just make our way down while we were still happy.

We took a different way down than we had coming up, got lost in the process, but finally made it to a lodge/restaurant called Bleckenau. By how everyone was looking at us I think we were the first Americans to make it that way. Sadly, the bus we were expecting at Bleckenau wouldn't be coming for another hour and a half, so we decided to just walk the three miles back to Neuschwanstein and take the bus from there.

Cool tree I fit inside in Bleckenau

View of Neuschwanstein and the plane from Marienbrücke while waiting for the bus

Eisenberg and Ehrenberg Castles
That night, after hiking some 12+ miles or so, we went to an amazing Italian place and stuffed our faces. The next day, on the way home, we stopped at a couple of castle ruins just because they were nearby. These castles, Eisenberg and Ehrenberg, were I think the last castles built Germany. So, with these castles, you are seeing an end of an age.

We got so lucky with the weather. This is on the walk up to Eisenberg Castle

Looking from Eisenberg to Ehrenberg

A tower inside Ehrenberg castle

And this is the end of this part of the saga! I'll try to get our other trips up sometime before we head to the states on Monday.