Weekend Getaway

Heidelberg & Nurnberg Weekend

Friday morning we headed over to spend the weekend in Heidelberg. Shelby had three days off and it was our eight year anniversary so we decided to get away for a few days. After checking into the hotel we headed downtown. Heidelberg is one of a few cities that were not leveled by the air raids during WWII. It's a big university town that sits on the Neckar River. Before we could do anything we had to find parking, which was not easy in the Jeep. We drove the Jeep instead of the Durango because we were going to head over to a 4x4 park on Saturday to go offroading. The Jeep is too high to fit in any of the parking garages so we had to try to find street parking, which had us driving in circles for a while but eventually we lucked up.

First thing we did was head over to Heidelberger Schloss (that's German for Heidelberg Castle). It is huge and gorgeous! It was built around 1214 and since then it has survived two lightning strikes that caused fires, wars and other deconstruction and rebuilding efforts. The grounds and the view were especially pretty with all the colored fall leaves on the trees. We walked around the grounds and did a self guided tour where you listen to information on these funny looking phone things. After touring the castle and seeing more of the city part of Heidelberg we ate dinner at a German restaurant. We had potato salmon soup and stuffed mushrooms for appetizers, Colin LOVED the mushrooms. I had Rinderfilet Madagaskar (steak with a pepper cream sauce) and Shelby had some venison dish with sauce on top. Mmmmmm!

Saturday we discovered that the 4x4 park was a lot further than Shelby thought it was. It turned out to be 2.5 hours from Heidelberg. We decided to go anyway because it was raining outside and walking around the city with Colin in the rain wasn't the best idea. When we finally got there the stupid place was closed! Apparently some company had paid a ton of money to rent the place for the entire day and it was closed to the public. Shelby tried telling them we came from Ramstein which was 4 hours away but they didn't seem to care. SO we drove all that way in the gas guzzling Jeep and burned up a ton of Shel's gas rations for nothing! :(

Since the offroad park was a bust we went to Nurnberg. It is another interesting city with stuff to see and is a known toy capital for Germany. We went through the Handwerkhof and saw a bunch of hand crafted toys, pewter sculptures and wood stuff. It was all very neat. Then we went to the Nurnberg Toy Museum which sounded cool in the guide book I bought for the town. There was a play area for kids and we thought there would be a bunch of fun stuff for Colin to see there. This too turned out to be a big bust. The museum was three floors worth of antique toys that were all behind glass. Toys back in the day were ugly and boring! It looked like a flea market, lol. There wasn't anything interactive to catch Colin's interest. The play area was a room with a bunch of toys and games for kids to play, not quite the playground area we were hoping for. Colin didn't seem to mind though and took advantage of the opportunity to run around and burn off a little energy after being stuck in the car all day. After grabbing a bite to eat we set off for the three hour ride back to Heidelberg.

Sunday morning we packed up and visited a bazaar on one of the bases in Heidelberg. There was a bunch of neat stuff there and I was able to get my flu shot without having to go sit forever at the stupid immunization clinic...score! LOL. We got some delicious Italian wine, a handstitched suede coin purse for my Euro, and a few other things. Then it was time to head back home. We took a different route than we did when we came over and it was so pretty. I love all the fall leaves on the trees and the colors all over the mountains.