Week 48: Our Second Visitor

Well, it has been about 9 months, but we had our second visitor a few weeks ago. While you may recall our last visitor was a friend of mine, this time we were joined by a friend of Jason's. We took him to a number of sights that we have visit before, including the Manderscheid Castles, Burg Eltz (a place where we went with our last visitor) and Luxemburg's Casemates.  

Jason, his Long Time Friend and Manderscheid's Niederburg 

Luxembourg City

We, of course, found some fantastic new things, including the slide in the picture below. You may recall a previous slide we had found in Germany. The one was located in a playground in Luxembourg City. I don't have a video (our guest tried, but the video did not really come out very well since the slide is covered), but can attest to it be quite awesome, though the climb up was a bit awkward as it was meant for much smaller people. And no, we did not push kids out of the way to go down the slide...we calmly waited our turn.

Awesome Slide!

Not shown in the photo above is the rest of the playground, which was just as cool. It looked like a pirate ship! And even included a crow's nest that you could climb into. Additionally there was the swing set, shown in the movie below, where kids got to have the excitement of almost swinging into each other, but due to the mathematics of the paths, never did. And, the best part, which I also don't have documentary evidence of, but I have seen in a number of other European playgrounds was an Archimedes's screw and a set of dams and pumps so you can be the Army Corps of Engineers and manage the water flow through the area. European playgrounds are awesome and teach kids about math, science and engineering! It is like spending the day at the MOS! (On a side note--the Boston Museum of Science's web address is mos.org--Jason just wondered if MIT might have provided some help in getting them such a name.)

With our last visitor, we had visited Burg Eltz, which is the old castle in Europe that is still owned by one of the original families, and large section of it was under renovation. As can be seen in the picture below, they are not yet complete and we still get to see a crane with the castle, though much of the other work has been completed and really looks great compared to the scaffolding we saw on our last visit.

Burg Eltz with a Crane

We sent our visitor off with a dramatic train catch. I rushed in and bought his ticket, while he grabbed his bag. We hurried up to the platform, and just as we stepped off the escalator, the passengers were stepping off the freshly arrived train. I've been riding the train a lot in the past year and that is the most perfect timing I have ever been involved in--talk about luck. Two minutes later and we would have missed it!