Germany--the highlights

I give up on detail posting about Germany.  It has become a road block to blogging.  We went, we had fun, we came back. Ta da! Here are some highlights:

Palace in Wertzburg. Dan's favorite palace because of the paintings that came to life. I can't remember the art term, but for example one painting had a leg sticking out of it, and it was hard to tell where the painting stopped and the statue began.

This is a picture of part of a walled city.  They had cities like these all along the romantic road.  Some of them allowed you to walk along the wall. This picture was taken from one of the big towers you could go up.

This is a picture of the castle turned hotel that we stayed in one night.

This is the Linderhoff Palace. Mad King Ludwig's hunting palace.

This is Neuschwanstein Palace. King Ludwig built this one to be the perfect Medieval castle in the late 1800's.  It is the castle Walt Disney styled Sleeping Beauty's castle after.

Here is another view.

Here is Hohenschwangau Castle. Ludwig's father's castle.  It was also decorated in reflection of Medieval Times.

We went to Dachau Concentration Camp near Munich.  It was sobering to go through, but I wanted to since we were there in Germany.  We learned more about World War II and what the prisoners there went through.

Festung Hohensalzburg, Salzburg, Austria.  This is the fortress in Salzburg.  It was never taken by force and we could see why.  It was almost even impossible for tourists to find the entrance.  We didn't see as much in Salzburg as we wanted to due to the fact it rained all day, but we did see the fortress and a Mozart museum.

This is the road through the black forest (you know black forest ham, black forest cake, black forest gummy bears, etc).  We wanted to get out and hike, but weren't able to find information and were short on time.

We stopped at Heidelberg Castle on our way back to Frankfurt. It was pretty amazing, but nearly as well positioned as the fortress in Salzburg. 

Here is a picture of what was a gunpowder tower until it was shot with cannon and exploded during the Thirty Years' War (I think).

These are some Roman Ruins discovered right in the heart of Frankfurt.

The Reichstag (German Parliament building) in Berlin.

This is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.  It was a different memorial than what I'm used to, but was very impressive.

This is part of the Berlin Wall.  They marked the wall's route around the city, but this was part of the wall they actually saved.

Bebelplatz is a plaza in Berlin where Hitler had a bunch of books burned.  There is a memorial there with a quote by Heinrich Heine (a poet from the early 1800's) that says,  "Where they burn books, they ultimately burn people".

This is a garden gnome that we found in the DDR Museum in Berlin where they showed what life was like in East Germany during the cold war.

 Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.

We traveled from Berlin to Potsdam, where we walked around the grounds of a bunch of palaces built around Frederik the Great's time.  Here is the one we were actually able to tour the inside of--Sanssouci.  It was my favorite palace and was in the French Rococo style.  It was just fun to see.

This is the New Palace in Potsdam.  It is in the same park as the Sanssouci palace.  we were not able to tour it because it was closed on the day we went, but it was fascinating to look at from the outside.

Well, that is the extremely short version of our trip. Now I can get on with the rest of our lives.