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!

The Catch Up Post

It has been a number of weeks since I last posted. These has been because (1) Jason and I took a vacation for the first part of September and (2) I have been travelling a ton for work lately. So, this post will serve to catch up on some highlights of the last few weeks.

The last weekend of August included two rather nice trips for us, both involving nearby villages and castles. There are two particularly awesome things about this weekend that I want to share. The first is this slide:

Unfortunately, since it was so wet out that day (I had, only 20 minutes before this video was taken, fallen firmly on my ass while we were climbing down from a bell tower on its slippery wooden stairs. Ow. My tail bone is still recovering.) that I couldn't get much speed up while I was on the slide, but man, I can't wait to go back and try it out when I don't have wet pants slowing me down.

The second fantastic thing was a trip to the town of Manderscheid, which was having a medieval festival at one of the town's *two* castles. Evidently, the castles were owned by competing families, who spent their time eyeing each other across the small river. The lower castle was quite a complex and we spent some time walking through it with hoards of other visitors who were there for the festival.

Me in front of Niederburg

After that weekend I headed out to the Netherlands, the met up with Jason in Boston a few days later. We had a great time back in the States visiting our friends and family, despite the fact that I completely lost my voice due to strep. Hopefully I didn't get anyone sick (if you did, send me a note and I will send you a 'get well' card by way of apology), as I was walking around for a few days most likely contagious, before my dad told me to go to the clinic.

Instead of heading right home to Germany after vacation, Jason headed to Texas (Jason' characterization of his first ever trip to Texas: "It is hot and flat.") for a conference/workshop and I went to Beauvais, France to sit in on a series of training sessions performed in French for my company's software. Beauvais is generally an unremarkable European city. This is my 3rd work visit there. It is a smaller sized city (about the size of Concord, NH population-wise) and has all of your standard cafes and stores that you expect. It also has a cathedral. A very tall cathedral that was never finished and has beautiful and large stained glass windows. If you ever find yourself in Beauvais, it is a must see.

Beauvais Cathedral

Jason's flight back from Texas ended up being delayed 4 hours, so he didn't end up getting back home until late in the afternoon last Saturday, so we had a bit of an abbreviated weekend. We did venture out on Sunday and explored a bit of the Vulkaneifel. Part of the area near where we lived used to be very volcanic--and is still a little volcanic. We took a few walks around some maares (volcanic crater lakes). It was very nice and there were many Germans also out for walks. One of the maares we visited had quite a swimming spot. The maares make great swimming holes, as they drop off very quickly--evidenced by the 7 meter high diving platform on the shore in the below photo. We'll need to come back here next summer.

Swimming Area with High Dive Platform