28 :)

Still playing catch up!  I have to do these posts in chronological order or it will bug me.

So, back in June I turned 28.  Old lady.  28 has been great so far though! 

So, to remember what I was doing on that day... I was super pregnant, I took Luke to school in the morning, Ella didn't have preschool that day so she and I hung out for a bit, we ate lunch and dinner with friends (Jake had to be at the church that night so I pretty much didn't see him that day), and then my cute neighbor, Cindy, had us over for cake and ice cream.  She's a talented cake maker/decorator.  The cake she made me was darling! 

I had this picture on my phone.  Fun times :)

Day 4. A little more Germany and some Luxembourg

Bernkastel-Kues was one of the cutest villages we saw on our little Germany trip.  We spent our last day browsing the shops there and eating gelato.

So cute.

I love that there are so many great gelato shops here in Europe.  Acc to Ella, we could eat it EVEWY day.  We saw "spaghetti" gelato at a few of the shops in Germany and wondered what it was.  Jake ordered it at this place and it was super good.  Spaghetti noodle shaped vanilla gelato with strawberry sauce on it.  Yum. 

A lot of the buildings had calligraphy on them.  Kind of cool that they actually do calligraphy here.  I took a class at BYU and loved it.  This Gothic font was really fun to learn, but I've never really had a reason to use it since.  Fun to see it again.

They had cutie street signs.

More vineyards! 

Random dental office we walked by

And another vineyard pic as we drove away from the town... 

Next stop on the way home was Luxembourg.  Another country to check off the bucket list and we wanted to see the American Cemetery and Memorial.  5,076 American soldiers are buried here, including General Patton. 

Names of those who went missing..

 Cool map of what happened where durring WWII...

Luckily we can buy gas on military bases in Germany. It gets expensive off base. We had to fill up in France this trip on the way to Spangdahlem and on the way home.  Just for random trivia in the future, it was about 109 Euro to fill up this summer there.

We hit a lot of traffic on the way home since France decided to close some of their freeways.  Sort of annoying when that happens.  It added a couple of hours to our trip.  Good thing we had a lot of snacks to keep us company.  It was a fun little vacation though  Can't wait to go back :)

Day 3 Memorial Weekend: Fantasialand and Cologne Cathedral

We spent this day playing at Fantasialand and then later in the evening checked out Cologne.  Fantasialand felt like Disneyland but less crowded and with characters we weren't familiar with.  The park is broken up into different areas of the world... Africa, China Town, Berlin, Fantasy and Mystery. 

Luke was big enough to ride most of the rides there.  He and Jake had a good time riding!  Ella went on quite a few, too.   

They've got fun activities for the kiddos that are included with admission... like face painting.  Luke was transformed into a dragon and Ella asked for a heart and a fairy. Not your avg. face painting.  These people go all out!  I need her to come to our house on Halloween.

Ella loved hers.  Luke, not so much.  He didn't like his face being completely covered.

When we got to the park they gave the kids little booklets to have stamped by various dragons and creatures in the park. If you find enough of the characters you get a surprise at the end of the day. Anyway, we were on the lookout for these things between rides and shows. Ella would only go up to them if one of us would go with her. Guess they are a little creepy.

cheese

We couldn't drag Ella away from this area.  Lots of puddles to play in under a big octopus.

A closeup of her fairy cheek :)

 This frog ride was Ella's favorite.  Luke liked one of the roller coasters best. 

We were tired and hungry at the end of the day and drove over to Cologne to get some dinner and to see the cathedral.  It took forever to find parking in that city!  And there were a lot of restraunts, but most were closed for dinner.  Weird.  We ended up finding a pretty good Italian restraunt though.  Here's the cathedral.  It is HUGE in person.  The kids were tired and didn't want to get out of the car, but once we were out they wanted to keep running around this place to chase pigeons and didn't want to leave.

The front door to the place.  Huge. 

That's it from day 3.  Promise I was there, too.  haha.  I was the one with the camera pretty much the whole trip.

Day 2 Germany: Burg Eltz and Cruising the Rhine

Our second day in Germany was spent hiking to Burg Eltz and cruising on the Rhine River.  Made me feel like an old lady carrying baby around in my belly up the hills!  Rick Steves says this is his favorite castle.  I thought it was pretty cool looking on the outside.  I feel like we've seen so many castle interiors since living over here that I could have skipped seeing the inside though.  The kids are pretty much over seeing the interior of castles, too.   Once you've seen a few, you've pretty much seen them all.  This one is in a magical location, which made it worth the trip!   The hike to get there is so pretty.  The history is pretty neat, too.  The same family has lived in and owned this place for 33 generations...since the 12th century.   Crazy.  

A hiker saw me taking some pictures with my phone and took this one of our "family of 5".  The only family picture we got of all of us...  a phone pic :)

And a few more from our castle hike...

Ella picked flowers along the way.

Always on the lookout for treasures...

Up close!  Pictures weren't allowed inside.

Going inside!

Climbing on castle walls.   The only thing they wanted to do once we were there.

View from the castle...

This one is blurry but I liked it since it shows Luke with his walking stick.  Ella was done walking at this point.  Lucky she had her dad to carry her the rest of the way up the hill to the car.  I was working pretty hard just getting my own rear end up the hill.

 

After our castle excursion we drove over to Bacharach for our Rhine River cruise. We drove through some cute towns and pretty countryside to get there.

I don't know if there was a biking event going on that weekend or if there are always a ton of bikers around, but we passed a lot.

 A lot of vineyards too!  They completely covered most of their little mountains.  Rick Steves always talks about where to try alcohol in his travel books/movies.  It's a good thing we don't drink.   Saves us a lot of money on these European excursions!  I love seeing the vineyards though.

 Driving into Bacharach...  such a cute town!   The roads were so narrow. 
pics taken from inside the car.  Don't mind the bug splats on the windshield.

These next pics were taking while waiting for our river cruise...

The boat :)

And some of the views from the river.  So pretty.

Lots of castles along the Rhine.  Castles and super cute little villages.

 

 We got off the boat at St. Goar and took the train back to Bacharach after looking around for a while.  Here are some pics from St. Goar.

Seeing all the 'fart' signs made us chuckle the whole trip.

 Lots of beer steins to buy for souvenirs! 

Both towns were just super cute and stereotypical German.   

 We always have to stop for some Gelato.  Ella had no idea it was on her nose and that she had a moustache here.  haha.

 

And I think that was about it from day 2 of our Memorial Day weekend getaway. :)