Germany

As a gift to ourselves before Johannes deployed we decided to take the kids on a family vacation. We had a lot of different ideas but we finally decided to go to the military resort of Garmish-Partenkirchen in Germany, right along the border of Austria.

It was a great choice, because not only did we get to use our German (which at least for me has been long dormant) but it was a very nice hotel with a huge heated pool and hot tub where the kids could swim and bob and play around after a full day of boring sight-seeing that mom and dad made them do.

We took the free rotater (aka "space-A") plane up to Rammstein Germany and had a new friend of ours let us come over to her house for a while for dinner and a chance for the kids to run around before we got on the sleeper train to Munich.

Here we are on our first of many trains during our trip. Matthijas was excited by doing something new but it took him a few times of climbing onto trains to realize he was on a train. We are really looking forward to climbing into even a train bed for some sleep as we had already been traveling for 12 hours.

As it turned out the sleeper train was nothing of the sort and we ended up hopping trains all night picking up both kids and luggage about every two and a half hours to jump on to another train. Not quite what we were hoping for, but we were able to arrive at Garmish just in time on Monday morning for our first fun day trip.