Park and Heidelberg Castle

Well, now I am playing catch up with my blog posts.  Hopefully I will get quite a few done and be able to keep posting.  But of course we leave for Belgium tomorrow, so I won't have the weekend.  Oh and I am volunteering at VBS next week.  But I am going to get caught up :-)  No rest for the weary!  So AJ heard about the "climbing park" from Michael and I have been wanting to check it out and we finally had an afternoon open, so off we went.  We stopped at a local bakery to get some bread to feed the ducks on the way.

 

The boys loved this!!!  Later in the afternoon there were some other kids and they were running around it, jumping on, spinning it super fast!!  All giggles and smiles!!!

 

Michael is chatting with a new friend from his perch on top of the ship

 

AJ trying out the zip line!  Boy I really, really LOVE German playgrounds!!  So many things you wouldn't find in the states because of safety hazards.  A lot of us over here say if you can survive a German childhood, you can survive anything!  :-)

 

Some other kids dug these holes I believe, but the boys had a lot of enjoyment out of them!

 

Then it was finally time to go, so off we went to find the ducks.

 

There is never a shortage on ducks that is for sure.  The boys thought it was great and threw the bread at the ducks to see if they could catch them in their beak.  Some of the ducks actually did!!!

 

Then on Tuesday July 2nd some friends of ours, the ones we went to Berlin with, invited us to go to Heidelberg and see the castle.  Unfortunately David had to work but we will definitely go back.  It is a really great town!!  You know I have to put in my history lesson, so here is a little bit for you.  They say this castle's ruins are among the most important Renaissance structures north of the Alps.  It was demolished in the 17th and 18th century and has only been partially rebuilt since.  It was first built in 1214 AD.  An interesting fact, Mark Twain described the Heidelberg Castle in his 1880 travel book A Tramp Abroad.  After this its popularity became wide spread with many different countries.  Now more than three million visitors a year go there.

 

 

The hike up was a really, really steep one.  These kids decided they should run up it.  I am not sure how they did it.  It was enough just to walk.

 

Here the four kids were playing keep away while Alex was on his photo shoot for his birthday party later this month.

 

Here is super Alex and Michael off to beat the bad guys. 

 

The boys on the balcony of the castle checking out the view!

 

These kids are just way too cute!!!  You have to love them!!!  And such good posers for pictures!  You can tell that both moms take a lot of pictures!

 

The view of the town, you can see the bridge over the river and it is beautiful!

 

Patiently waiting while we were finishing picture taking! 

 

I hardly get any photos of the boys and I, my friends were so wonderful and offered all around the castle!!!

 

I just really couldn't get over the view, you could see forever it felt like.

 

I absolutely love this!!  The three boys are holding hands!!  We have traveling buddies whenever we go anywhere and they decided instead of being with an adult, they would be travel buddies with each other!  :-)  I have a few pictures of them walking around together.

 

They were practicing for some sort of show they were going to have there.  The boys were enthralled with them singing!  That is one thing that is really neat, they have concert and shows in the castles during the summer.  They actually have a great fireworks show at this one that we might check out in August.

 

There were statues throughout this whole wall and as you can see at the bottom, that is the door to a museum to give you a bit of perspective you can only see the top of the door.

 

I am not exactly sure what this is, but it is was very different.  We thought maybe something to do with the sun.

 

They had an apothecary museum there.   It was very interesting.  Here is Michael looking at all the different bottles of who knows what.

 

They had a kid's one and the kids were interested in the scale they had there.  It was fun to watch them figure out when it was even and how to get it that way.

 

This was a typical office back then - such beautiful pottery they used.  There is also a crocodile hanging from the ceiling.  This was interesting because we saw those quite a few places in the museum and I am not sure why.

 

These are fun looking and are used for making mineral water.  They produced the carbonic acid of artificial mineral waters, which, for a long period, could be obtained in chemist's shops only.

 

So I think I finally found my wine cask I want in my forever home ;-)

The three girls trying out some local wine and it was really, really yummy!!!

I thought that was the one I wanted, but then I found this one.  It holds approximately 195,000 Liters.  That might last me for awhile.

 

So the kids found a hole and what did they want to do - climb! 

 

On the other side of the castle

 

So this is interesting, at least to me, the wall was struck by lightning and it fell.  They rebuilt it and then it was struck by lightning again.  So they decided not to rebuild it again.

 

This is a fountain of Neptune out on the castle grounds.  The grounds are soooo beautiful and huge!  We brought a soccer ball up there and they kids had a "ball" playing!!  Interesting happened while they were playing, there were some Chinese tourists there with really big lenses and they were taking pictures of our children.  Like a lot of pictures.  I am not really sure why and we decided it was time to leave.  It wasn't just one, there were like three of them.

 

Andre and Michael were so proud that they climbed up there!

 

After the castle we headed down into town to walk around a little bit.  This is a statue in the main square called Madonna on grain market.  It is a statue of Mary who is depicted as victorious and the virgin queen of heaven.  The Elector had the intention to convince his "infidel" subjects from the Catholic faith, not a great success.  Many preferred to immigrate.

 

And you guessed it, it was a hot day and Porchea loves ice cream just as much as we do, so we had to stop for some yummy ice cream to cool us down!!!

 

This is the Karl-Theodor Bridge, better known as Old Bridge, it is over the Neckar River.  It was built in 1788 and is one of the most famous sights in Heidelberg.  It leads from the old town to the New Landstrasse.

 

These are copies of the original statues sculpted by Franz Conrad Linck, the originals are in a museum.  This is the Karl-Theodor Memorial statue built in 1790

 

 This is looking back up at the castle from the bridge, you can see how enormous it is.  We didn't get to see all of the town so I can't wait to go back and visit it again and be able to show David all around!