Megan and Brent--Guest wave #5 (April 23th to May 8th, 2012)

As you know already we got to make a couple of our big trips with Brent and Megan during their stay, UK (Dublin, Edinburgh) and Italy. We had some wonderful days in Germany as well. I picked them up in Luxemburg on Monday evening and as usual, we forced them to beat their jet lag by staying up until 11pm.

We spent Tuesday exploring Trier (mostly in the rain) and doing all the Roman sights and Wednesday we made a trip to Burg Eltz. As usual they were quite impressed with the castle!

Thursday we hung around Trier a bit in the morning before we headed off for Ireland. Listen to this: this keeps happening to us, it’s turning into some what of a theme for the year. We book travel ahead of time, usually on the weekends at specific times so Skye can maximize his time in the archives. Every time we plan something, we realize after the fact that it’s over a holiday weekend and that we could have spent an extra day there (you know by now we always take short quick trips packed with a weeks worth of sightseeing). It has happened three times in the last 2 months (yeah, Germany has a million holidays! actually it's about 40 in a year) and then it’s always too late to change our tickets.

So, Germany had a holiday the day after we returned from the UK. We looked into changing our plane tickets, but it would have cost a fortune so we just stuck with it. Instead we explored a new castle in Germany a couple hours from Trier. It’s called the Marksburg Castle in a small village called Braubach. It's about a 20 minute easy hike to the top. The tour was in German (they had an English one but we had just missed it and the next one wasn’t for four hours) but they had nice booklets with an English translation. Our tour guide didn’t seem to be thrilled about the children on the tour and was kinda grumpy. haha! It was really cool, this one even had a torture room! Creepy! After the tour we ate our lunch in the warm sun and made our way back to the train station. It was one of the first super warm days of the year, so we felt a cone of gelato was appropriate.

The original plan was to go to Cochem on the second Wednesday, the day before we left for Italy. However, it was raining harder than I have seen in a long time! Downpours are usually quick and over soon, but this lasted literally the entire morning. We had umbrellas, but this was the kind of rain where an umbrella wasn’t much help. After much discussion we decided to skip Cochem to avoid having to swim to the top of the castle. But this was okay because we were doing so much travel that some down time was just what we needed. We met Skye for lunch, did some grocery shopping and then Megan made us chili for dinner and we hung out the rest of the evening.

Thursday was a lot like the previous week, we hung out and prepared in the morning to leave for Italy that afternoon. As you know from my other blog, Rome was awesome!

Since we made it back to Trier in the afternoon, we had time to do some last minute shopping before Brent and Megan left back to the states the next morning. We also had to get groceries for dinner. Originally we had planned on having pizza that night because we needed something easy, but we ate so much Pizza in Italy, it didn’t sound good at all! We got groceries and headed home to pack and relax for the evening.

I’m so glad Brent and Megan made it to Europe to visit us! And thrilled that we got to see so many places with them! It was a wonderful time!