Next stop:\u00a0 Augsburg.\u00a0 Given that this is my husband\u2019s hometown, this part of the visit was heavily tilted towards visiting his family, and less a matter of tourism.<\/p>\n
On Thursday<\/strong>, however, we made a detour,\u00a0 adding (according to google when we mapped it out) 1 \u00bd hours onto the drive by stopping in Strasbourg along the way.\u00a0 It is, indeed, a magical thing to be able to just program the GPS to go to Strasbourg, city center, look for parking garages when you get to what the system deems to be the center (sure, parking\u2019s expensive, but not really that outrageous for a couple hours), find yourself a map (these are generally available as signs on the streetcorners, if nothing else), and make your way to the center, and the main sights \u2013 in this case, the cathedral.<\/p>\n So here are a couple observations on Strasbourg:<\/p>\n The cathedral is indeed impressive, all Gothic-y and stained glassed and all.\u00a0 But of all the cathedrals on our tour thus far, it was also the most tourist-choked, especially with schoolgroups \u2013 and, while there was no charge to enter the cathedral, it felt very much like a tourist site rather than a holy place.\u00a0 On top of which, the organist started playing \u2013 not any music but just long, low, loud notes.\u00a0 I\u2019d say he was tuning the organ but I don\u2019t see how you would do such a thing.<\/p>\n The architecture of the city center itself was clearly a hybrid of French and German \u2013 some half-timbered, some, well, more French-looking \u2014 as befits this city which has changed hands over time.\u00a0 Some of the streets even had their old names \u2013 e.g., \u201cBlindergasse\u201d as the German name for a street now named something like \u201cRue des Aveugles\u201d \u2013 that is Street of the Blind.\u00a0And, as we walked back to the parking garage, there were three soldiers in front of us, walking towards an old-ish church midway between the cathedral and the parking garage.\u00a0 And they joined up with a couple more, and seemed to be standing guard in front of the church, as if there was some threat reported there.\u00a0 What exactly was going on we never figured out.<\/p>\n Anyway, we walked back to the car and continued on to Augsburg \u2013 to an extremely funky old apartment in the city center, just a couple blocks, really, from the center, the Rathaus.\u00a0 The apartment is in a very old building, on the fourth\/top floor, with a very, very green rooftop garden (the owner requests guests water the plants), with a TV, hammocks, and the only table large enough for the family, in the apartment.\u00a0 There was also only one \u201cregular\u201d bedroom, as well as a fold-out bed, and sheets to put on the couch, and parking was a bit of a mess; much of the area is residents-only, or residents-or-pay during the week; the first three nights we had a 10 -15 minute walk from the car (and it helped significantly that my husband knew the area), and only the last day, Sunday, did we find somewhere closer.\u00a0 But the whole place was furnished in a funky style, and the kids thought it was fantastic, though I felt a bit odd about staying not at a special-purpose rental apartment, but at the \u201chost\u2019s\u201d own home. \u00a0I suppose this is \u201cauthentic\u201d Air B&B, as we were greeted by a young couple, who said they were headed off to their campsite just out of town, and that they loved to camp in the summer so that\u2019s why they offered the place for rent. \u00a0And, while that\u2019s believable from the decorations and guidebooks showing travel to Kenya and Thailand and so forth, at the same time, they do offer the place year-round, so one suspects that the true story is that Augsburg isn\u2019t that much of a tourist draw, so they are only booked sporadically, and then bunk elsewhere for the time, to earn extra cash.<\/p>\n So on Friday<\/strong> we had a relatively simple day:\u00a0 breakfast at my mother-in-law\u2019s, then a \u201ctour of Neusaess,\u201d the directly-adjacent suburb of my husband\u2019s childhood.\u00a0 In the evening, a barbeque at my sister- and brother-in-law\u2019s, with some cousins also in attendance.<\/p>\n Saturday<\/strong> we went into Oberammergau, or, rather, to the nearby mountain.\u00a0 I am most certainly not a hiker, so we took the cable car up, then hiked down, and, well, the kids had a great time.\u00a0 I did not.\u00a0 Then we went to a pool nearby, which had a couple waterslides and such for the kids.<\/p>\n Sunday<\/strong> we stayed closer to home.\u00a0 We started the day with church at St. Ulrich\u2019s, the major basilica in the city.\u00a0 Turned out, it was the concluding service for \u201cSt. Ulrich\u2019s week\u201d and was a special \u201cservice of nations\u201d in which people from the various Catholic immigrant communities participated, so we had readings and petitions in other languages, and special greetings from the city council, and, well, in the end it lasted for nearly 2 hours, but the kids were so impressed with the African gospel procession they didn\u2019t complain.\u00a0 We then met my mother-in-law for lunch, then, with her, toured the Fuggerei (\u201cthe oldest social settlement in the world\u201d) with her and walked around the city a bit.<\/p>\n Monday<\/strong> was Legoland.\u00a0 As a nice bonus, we managed to get 2 for 1 coupons off our apple juice cartons the prior week, by happenstance, really, after I\u2019d tried to look online without success.\u00a0 My 9 year old, as expected, enjoyed himself the most, though, his favorite thing was not, as you\u2019d think, the rides, but instead looking at the Lego Neuschwanstein and everything else in Miniland.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s that for Augsburg.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Next stop:\u00a0 Augsburg.\u00a0 Given that this is my husband\u2019s hometown, this part of the visit was heavily tilted towards visiting his family, and less a matter of tourism. On Thursday, however, we made a detour,\u00a0 adding (according to google when we mapped it out) 1 \u00bd hours onto the drive by stopping in Strasbourg along […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[415],"class_list":["post-4794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-vacation-2016"],"yoast_head":"\n