The Aerie
Whew, a long day. Today's pictures are of Rothenburg, a walled city filled with Medieval history. Rothenburg was delightful.
I'm sorry if this is a brief entry, but the process of getting my photos online was particularly grueling today. For some reason when I pulled my pictures off my flash card, they re-ordered themselves, meaning that a good portion of the evening was spent renaming and rearranging the photos into their proper order. Despite this setback I managed to apply comments to every photo as well as rearrange the template for what I hope is easier viewing.
The photos begin with yesterday's departure for our home of our hosts from Germany. We had hoped for a family group photo, but alas the rain and logistics prevented this. By this time our hosts should have arrived in our home.
Today we managed to get going at a reasonable hour and make the 90-minute drive to Rothenburg. This was my first "real" experience on the Autobahn, and I must say that I like it.
It's not so much the speed, as it is the orderliness imposed by the speed. The rule is strict: slower traffic keep right, or risk a devastating rear-end collision. This works really well, and should be imposed with violence if necessary in the United States, where any self-righteous twit can plant him- or herself in the left lane and then drive exactly on the speed limit.
The result of this simple rule applied worked well for us today: I have no idea if the Autobahn is more or less dangerous per passenger mile than U.S. highways, and I'm too tired to look it up now.
In Rothenburg we visited the Marktplatz, where a band was raising money to buy the final "E" in "market". The music was great. For most of the day the weather was very nice, cool and sunny with some clouds. Howver mid-afternoon it got cold and rainy for a couple of hours, making my tank-top a rather inappropriate form of attire. The sun re-emerged before the day was over.
We also visited the 12-th century church of St. James, a gigantic and terrifying Christmas store, and the Museum of Crime. The confection-of-the-day was the Schneeballen, which sounded delightful but proved a little much for me: basically a ball of pie crust covered with chocolate or cinnamon or something. It was like trying to eat a chocolate-covered whiffleball.
But we had a great time, even with a little rain, and are looking forward to having more fun tomorrow, although we don't quite know where we're going yet!
Posted by Albatross at August 1, 2006 5:30 PM | TrackBack