Wiesbaden, Germany

On the 12th of May, we caught the train back to Wiesbaden to finish our Europe trip at the Narula Vacation Home.  (Narula is my roommate's married name.) Tina and I have not seen each other since the day she got married in 1999 so it was fun to see her with a family and all grown up!  We stopped here on Mother's Day as well and were treated to our first real fondue meal.

Friday we decided to take a cruise up the Rhine River to see all the castles on the river.  I do not know if we got a photo of all of them but we got just a few.

This was in some park that we passed in the boat.

This is the town of Rudesheim where we caught the boat.

In Rudesheim we had our first doner.  This is sort of like a pita but a large one could feed 2 or 3 or 1 person for the day.

Saturday was the big day for Payton.  He had been asking since we booked the tickets to Europe if we could go here first.

It was fun to see all the decorations made out of Legos.

They had a driving course for an extra 5 euros.  We decided it was worth it for Payton to do since he had specifically asked if he could do this before we even got to the park.

They take the kids for 45 mins (free babysitting!) and then at the end are given a driver's license.

 The next stop was a roller coaster.  I decided to be brave and go on it.  Mike and Payton were in front and Tina and I rode together.  I was laughing so hard that I had a hard time catching my breath.  Then it was time for the younger boys to ride a roller coaster.

Payton rode with Tina's boys and husband.

This was a ride that took you over much of the park.  We were not sure if we really had to peddle or if they just had it there for you to to think you had to.  Mike was nice and took the kids in one car and Tina and I laughed in the other.

 

This ride had you pull yourself up and then let go and it would drop you.  You could go up and down as many times as you wanted in the allotted time for the ride.

 We came to the Mini Land.  This had different places from around Europe build all out of Legos.

Can you guess which place Payton ran to first?

They were making a Star Wars ride that was opening in in June.

We decided to eat at Legoland for dinner.  This was the last place open and we had to wait 15 mins for the pizzas to cook for the kids.  All the adults had their food - the kids had the look of beggars on their faces - "Please Sir, can I have some more"

Sunday we took the train in to Frankfurt to look around at some museums.  We were surprised at all the places that were closed on Sunday compared to the States.  We had a hard time finding somewhere to eat lunch and settled on a bar that served schnitzel.

This was a huge football (soccer to us Americans) outside the train station.  The Frankfurt train station is suppose to be one of the largest in Europe.

We walked through an expressionists art museum, communications museum, and architect museum.  This was about the only time it rained on us too.

Monday we toured the town of Wiesbaden with Tina.  We had read that they have the World's Largest Cuckoo Clock so we wanted to go see it.

The store had cuckoo clocks but what I saw was nativity pieces.  I decided on was one of these. I had seen one before and thought it very different.  The one I really wanted would have been close to $300 and would have been too tall to take on the airplane - it had 6 tiers. 

 This may have been the last paying toilet we saw the entire trip.  I still cannot get over having to pay to use the restroom.

Our last day we went to see this Russian church that was up on the hill.  You can take a train to see it and the train is powered by water.  We got lost and ended up at the top so we still rode the train down and back up.

This is the view from Biebrich Palace on the banks of the Rhine and Neroberg Hill with the Russian church

Payton and Tina's boy, Oscar, riding with the conductor.

We had to leave for the airport at 6:30 Wednesday morning.  We some how did not see that the flight left an hour later and landed an hour later in Atlanta than our tickets said.  When we got to Atlanta (11 hours later), they had workers with orange cards waiting for those of us that had about an hour to catch the next flight.  This paper allowed us to bypass the passport lines - they took us to the dignitaries line and we did not have to wait long.  It was scarier getting back into the US than it was to get past the passport checks in Paris and Germany.  We got grilled about where we had been and how long we had been gone and where we went while there and what we had brought with us.  Then we had to go retrieve our bags and recheck them and go back through security.  The US was the only place we had to remove our shoes for security.  We still had the orange card so we still were bypassing everyone.  We made it to our gate with only about 30 mins to spare before take off.  We were able to grab something to eat while on the plane and some drinks.  Then we still had more than 4 hours until we reached SLC.

We had tried so hard to stay awake the whole time.  Payton finally passed out the last hour of the flight.  It was hard to wake him up.  He went right to bed when we got home.  But Payton and I woke up for the day at 3.  We are just now (a week later) getting back to normal awake times.

We had a lot of fun and are already talking about going back sometime.  We just have to save up again and Mike needs to do more flights for sky miles!  Next time we may venture to England and Ireland or somewhere around that area.  It would be fun to live so close to so many historical places.