The Asplunds and Paxtons invited us to head over to Heidelberg with them one weekend. I had read about this little German town and its castle before heading over and wanted to see it, so we were excited to have some tour guides take us over.
We met up with everyone and headed out. This was our first experience on the autobahn. Yes, Germany does have some roads that don't have speed limits. For the most part, it is like driving on any other freeway, but we had a few iffy moments with people speeding by to pass and get places. They very much follow the stay out of the left lane unless passing.
After a few wrong turns down the steepest and skinniest roads ever, we arrived in the Altstadt. One of the things that surprised me about Frankfurt was how different it was from Vienna. Heidelberg reminded me a lot of Vienna. It had a the same charm and great feeling. We wandered around the town and made our way up to the castle.
While the missionaries decided to take the tram up the mountain, Matt and I opted to make the hike up (exercise and save money, alright!) We climbed up the trail, which was pretty much a 90 degree angle. Once we made it to the top, we realized that we went up the place and made it in the back of the castle. No wonder it was so steep. We finally met up with the missionaries and started exploring.
Castles seems to be everywhere in Germany, but I'm really glad we made it to this one. It is huge and in great shape considering. They started building it back in the late 1300-early 1400s and kept adding on for the next few hundred years. It is huge!
We went into one of the building and read about how important wine was to one of the princes who owned the castle. He had quite the storage system. We were pretty surprised when we came across this barrel.
Us and the Asplunds
Pretty big, right? That's what we thought until we went around the corner and saw this baby.
It was so big that you couldn't even really get a picture of the whole thing! You could go up those stairs and then walk across the back before heading down another set of stairs. That's a lot of wine! I was up top exploring when I saw Matt frantically motioning for me to hurry down. At first I was a little worried something was wrong with one of our senior missionary friends (just kidding! They aren't THAT old ;) ), but I got down, and he kept pointing at me and saying "Meine Frau..." to an older German couple. Gotta love Matt Man, he's got that German thing down. It turns out that nothing was wrong with them, they simply wanted to know if it was worth climbing the stairs. Since he couldn't understand them, he had them wait for me instead of asking pretty much anyone else there who could have communicated with them, haha.
We wandered around exploring some more before Matt and I somehow convinced everyone to go down the mountain with us instead of taking the tram. We were pretty convinced if we headed down this trail, we'd make it. It took a little longer than we anticipated, and we had to sneak through a under construction section to get back, but we finally made it.
Old clock. This was pretty cool, but it didn't have the right time. We couldn't figure out what we were doing wrong...
Matt and I wandered around the gardens while the rest of our party rested. It was definitely a little slower paced than the rest of our weekend trips, haha.
This was pretty cool. Part of this tower's wall just separated and fell down. You can now see inside the tower plus the part that came off.
Me, Matt, Sister Paxton, Sister Winley, Elder Asplund, Sister Asplund, Elder Paxton
Other trip highlight includes stopping at multiple ice cream shops and getting a few scoops at each place, seeing a wedding part come out from the city hall and hearing the crazy bands that played and seeing some great traditional goodies.
