Last stop before flying home, Brussels, July 2007 [View Full Entry]

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Rothenburg, July 2007 [View Full Entry]

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From Munich we flew to Brussels and then hopped a train to Brugge. The Brussels train station was really confusing (the guidebooks had warned us and we were still surprised how bad the signage was) and we ended up chasing down a very friendly train conductor to ask him where we were supposed to go. Then we spent most of the train ride to Brugge convinced that the Dutch announcements were telling us that our train was going to split and that we were on the wrong part. But apparently we don't speak Dutch very well because we made it there [View Full Entry]

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Munich, July 2007 [View Full Entry]

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We spent a couple of nights in Freiburg as part of our road trip around southern Germany. We stayed at the Black Forest Hostel, which was great. It was kind of industrial feeling and had a really nice, functional kitchen that we used to make dinner one night. It was located just a couple of minutes from the town center, and the room we had the first night was on the side of the building that faced a small river, so we slept to the sound of rushing water. So nice. Freiburg might go down as one of my favorite cities [View Full Entry]

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We stopped for a few hours between the Rhine Valley and the Black Forest in Heidelberg. What we noticed in Heidelberg, other than that the castle was very cool, was how many Americans were there. Between tourists, students studying abroad there, and the nearby American military base, it seemed like one out of every three people were heard talking was speaking English. We spent some time browsing through some shops in town, enjoying some Thai food for lunch (yum), and then we headed up the hill to visit the castle. The castle is in ruins and has only been partially rebuilt, [View Full Entry]

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After checking out of our retrotel in Echternach, Luxembourg, we headed back east into Germany and towards the start of the scenic part of the Rhine River Valley, called the ‘Romantic Rhine’. This area had a fun mix of castles, wine (especially Riesling), and windy roads running along the river. The Rhine River valley was also busy with trains on both sides of the river and barges going up and down. We stayed in St. Goar, one of the first towns we came to (driving north to south). Our hotel, Hotel An Der Fahre, was actually more like a B&B [View Full Entry]

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We picked up a rental car (Peugeot 207) in Cologne and took the Autobahn south-west towards Luxembourg. For the 5 days we were driving around Luxembourg and Germany, we didn’t have any hotel reservations. Not having any reservations gave us some flexibility in this portion of our trip which was good because we were indecisive about exactly where we wanted to go. We drove for a few hours and stopped in Echternach, a town just across the border from Germany. We looked at a couple of hotel rooms and chose the less smoky smelling one, the Hotel des Ardennes. We [View Full Entry]

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From Helsinki we flew to Cologne, Germany. We just had one night there and had found a great deal at the Hilton, so we got off the plane looking forward to a nice quiet night filled with bubble baths, television in English, and high thread-count sheets. That wasn’t exactly what happened, however. As we got off the train from the airport in downtown Cologne we noticed big crowds of people everywhere and lots of commotion. We finally figured out that it was Christopher Street Day, a huge annual gay pride celebration, going on just outside our hotel. We dropped our [View Full Entry]

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We’ve been bad about updating our blog lately - sorry! We've got good internet access again, though, so we'll get all caught up in the next few days. From Tallinn we took an hour and a half ferry ride across the Baltic Sea to Helsinki. The ferry was great and even offered opportunities for those interested to buy cases of vodka and beer at “low Estonian prices.” We didn’t partake, although in retrospect that might have livened up our stay in Helsinki. Helsinki was a much more modern city than most of the places we’ve been this summer. It's surrounded [View Full Entry]

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