Poor Amy

The school nurse called me last week to inform me of 'an incident.'  Several playground witnesses confirmed: Amy collided with another child (who happens to have a very hard head) during an intense round of "stuck-in-the-mud." Amy is now sporting a big, swollen purple eye...  Poor Amy!

So Thankful

   There isn't a Thanksgiving holiday in Britain.  There isn't even pumpkin pie filling in Britain... but that didn't stop us Caterpillar ex-pats in Peterborough from getting together and celebrating with a wonderful Thanksgiving feast (...including pumpkin pies made from scratch!)  All of the food was fabulous, the kids had a great time playing together (in the rain!) and there was plenty of good conversation too.  There was even the traditional group photo:

This year we are particularly thankful for our friends here in the UK and the opportunity that it is to be here.

 

Gobble, gobble!

Toothless Wonder

Here's little Amy - age 13 months - sporting her first tooth.  Yes, you read that right.  She was, in fact, over a year old before she grew any teeth.  And for a long while, she only had just one.  Thankfully, she now has a full set of healthy beautiful teeth... Almost.

Yesterday, Amy lost her first baby tooth (at 4 o'clock in the morning).  Despite the early-rise, we are glad she didn't swallow the tooth.  Last night, the Tooth Fairy worked her magic and Amy woke up this morning £1 richer. 

After a long, hard day of work:

Party Time

We had excellent travels back to the UK from our holiday in Germany and arrived home from the airport at 6 pm, just in time to throw on the Halloween costumes and head out for Trick-or-Treating. Here are the girls in their costumes:

Amy went as Winnie the Witch and Emily was a pink fairy.

The Brits' attitude towards Halloween is still very mixed so we had to do a lot of walking around the village to even come up with this meager assortment of sweets. However, it's nice to not have a lot of sugary junk lying around and the girls had a splendid time trick-or-treating.


Then, this last weekend, we joined in the British celebration of Bonfire Night, complete with fireworks, sparklers, and (you guessed it) - a giant bonfire.

Too Good to Be True?

So our trip to Germany last week went very smoothly.

We had good traffic driving to (and later from) the airport.

We had all the requisite documents (passports, boarding passes, etc.), none of which were stolen, lost or damaged during our holiday.

Our flight left on time and arrived a half hour early (total flight time = 1 hr.)

The four of us got seats together near the front of the plane - miraculous for a cheap, discount European airline.

Memmingen-Allgau airport (located 60 miles west of Munich) is a fabulous little airport - I think it gets 3 flights in and out each day... So it was about a 5 minute queue to get through customs & immigration and our luggage was already out and waiting for us. Nice!

Something unexpected had to happen eventually... and we can thank Hertz Rental Car Company for that part... We had reserved the cheapest thing available and, of course, this being a very small airport, they didn't have the Ford compact car we had booked. Instead, they told us we'd have to take this:A Mercedes E-class... with more luxuries than we even knew existed. Imagine, we had to drive this thing on the autobahn for a whole week.

Of course Matt was all smiles. After a few days cruising at 125 mph (recorded proof is on our Sat-Nav), I wondered how he'd ever readjust to driving the Zafira on British roads again...

We rented a holiday cottage for the week in lieu of staying in a hotel. Not only was it more affordable and spacious, but we enjoyed shopping at the local bakery and eating breakfasts and some dinners in. Our 'home' was conveniently located near Landsberg am Lech (see photos below) - only 25 miles from the airport and was central to all our planned excursions. The farthest we drove in one day was to Salzburg and back - a total of 200 miles - which takes about 20 minutes when driving a Mercedes E-class on the autobahn. Okay, it actually took a little longer. But we sure enjoyed the ride!

A little tour of our cottage:

The city of Landsberg (where we stayed):

Landsberg is a walled city and had plenty of beautiful/interesting architecture. Landsberg's claim to fame? Hitler was imprisoned in the Landsberg jail and wrote Mein Kampf here.


So after all this picture-perfect travel, and a couple hours exploring the town, we decided to eat out and enjoyed some authentic German fayre. It too, was perfect.

German Castles

We've seen a lot of castles in the last year, but none as unique as the two we toured in Germany.

The only way to see the interiors of either castle is by booking a guided tour. So we did just that. First we toured the Hohenschwangau castle, which was the childhood residence of King Ludwig II of Bavaria, then we hiked up to his second castle - Neuschwanstein - which he had constructed in later years.

The village below Hohenschwangau:

Then we headed up, up, up the mountain to see Neuschwanstein. We took a bus up halfway, then walked out onto a narrow bridge to get this photo:

The setting for this magnificent palace was almost more beautiful than the castle itself!

From the bridge, it was still about a 20-minute hike up the mountain to the castle entrance. Here is a view of the Hohenschwangau valley from the mid-point of our hike. You can see how far we had come up from the first castle:

Some more of our hike up to Neuschwanstein:

A quick rest for the little girls...

..then finally we made it!

Here's little Emily at the entrance (in pink):

And here we are inside the main gate:

After touring the inside of the castle, which was inexplicably ornate (sorry, we were not allowed to take photos inside), we indulged ourselves with a ride on a nearby Rodelbahn (Alpine slide). According to the kids, this was 'the most funnest thing' we did. Our 'sleds' were awfully reminiscent of a luge sled, except they were conveniently equipped with a hand-brake. We soon discovered it was way more exciting to just let the sleds go full speed! The kids had to ride with an adult so we traded off and went down 3 times each.

Here's a view of the Alpine Slide from the cable car (which we also enjoyed):

You can see it was quite the slide! It took a while to get towed up to the top and then several minutes sliding down. The curves really add speed!

And just in case we hadn't quite had our fill of thrill on these Alpine slopes, we also took turns riding the zip-line a few times.