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!