Pretty sure that from the minute I found out we were moving to Europe the Disney voices in my head start yelling Neuschwanstein! Neuschawanstein! over and over again. So in March we decided to finally quiet the voices so I could live in peace and quiet 😉 It takes about 8-9 hours to drive so we left after school on Friday and stopped halfway in Frankfurt.
We headed out in the morning and drove the rest of the way to Neuschawnstein Castle. Such a beautiful drive along the Romantic Road. It was amazing to see all the old watch towers along the drive with the rolling green hills. Germany is gorgeous! David and Mark kept making up stories about the guards in the towers. Holli really wanted to ride the horse drawn buggy up the path to the Castle but it was raining (in true European form) and the carriages had just pulled away and I didn’t want to just stand in the rain waiting for them to return. So we hoofed it. It was my first post-surgery hike so I was pretty proud of how quickly we made it up the trail. We had booked our tour of the castle in advance so we only had about 20 minutes to wait at the Castle before we could tour it. Unfortunately you can’t take photos except in the kitchen. But don’t worry I took a few in there because I WANT the stove.

I wish we hadn’t been so focused on the way up the mountain because on the way down we found a guy making hot and fresh quarkballen. Hands down our favorite street food yet! It was kind of like fried cake batter. The guy was selling them in paper cones and each cone had 3 inside. So the first time I ordered 3 cones so we could each try one. That worked out well till we ate them and then we went back 2 more times so we each ended up having 3 quarkballen. The guy was really sweet and told me “I was like that too when I started working here” then he gave me a rough recipe so we are going to try making them sometime.

We were able to find some super yummy bratwursts before we started our drive back. We stayed in Stuttgart for the night and got up and headed to Church before we continued driving. After Church we headed to Rothenburg ob der Tauber to walk around for a while. If you go I don’t recommend going on a Sunday if you want to go in any of the shops. The only places open were places to eat. But all the windows to the shops were amazing. It was like a Christmas market year round. I would have loved to have been able to go inside and look around better. We of course had to try the signature Schneeballen–snow balls. It is fried pie dough served in so many ways. They cut it into strips and then roll the strips into balls and fry it. Then you can cover it in chocolate or roll in nuts or cinnamon sugar or sprinkles. Most of us were not fans of how it tasted at all me included. Rothenburg is an adorable German medival village in the heart of Bavaria. All around the city they have maintained to wall and you can climb up and walk around and get an amazing view.

From there we headed back into Frankfurt for the night. We stopped by the Frankfurt Temple and walked around the grounds. Since the kids didn’t have school that Monday we woke up and drove to Cologne and stopped for a couple hours. We climbed the 533 stairs up to the top of the Cologne Cathedral and then at a much faster pace descended the 533 stairs back down. I was again pretty proud of my post-surgery knee. It didn’t give out on me at all and it kindly waited until we were at the bottom before the muscles started twitching and shaking uncontrollably. We walked around a little and did a little shopping before grabbing a quick lunch at Hard Rock Cafe. After lunch we headed home and found the coolest bathroom just inside the border to The Netherlands. It had a disco light in the family bathroom. I don’t know what was more impressive the disco light or the fact that they had a family bathroom.