What a fantastic trip!!!

We are home from our trip to Germany and Paris, and had a wonderful time. I'm going to break down the trip into a couple of posts, and most of the photos will not be posted here, but in my Shutterfly photo blog.

We arrived at the Frankfurt airport on Saturday, August 7th. After picking up our rental car (which Sean and Christy dubbed the "short bus"), we drove almost 4 hours up to Luneberg to meet Christy. She was waiting outside our hotel when we drove up, and it was so good to see her after almost 6 weeks away! We were all tired, but couldn't wait to get out and walk around the little town. I can see why she fell in love with Luneberg - it is quaint and pretty, and despite it's small size, has everything you could want, mostly within an easy walk. She had to ride a bus out to the campus, but other than that was able to walk everywhere. Here are a couple of photos to show you the town:

The first one is along the Ilmenau river right by our hotel. The second is a couple of the old buildings downtown, and the last is at the end of Christy's little street. We wandered around for a little while, and then had dinner at the last brewery left in Luneberg. We sat outside eating schnitzel and drinking beer. And then wandered around some more. We spent Sunday morning seeing the rest of the town, going to the top of the water tower, and checking out the three largest churches. Then we headed off to Wolfsburg.

Wolfsburg is the home of Volkswagon. When we arrived on Sunday night, we walked around outside of Schloss Wolfsburg (Wolfsburg Castle), and on Monday we went to the Volkswagon factory and took a tour of the factory as well as seeing some of the Autostadt (kind of like a museum and park combined). It was really very interesting. Late afternoon we headed off to return out "short bus", and catch a plane to Paris. How about that for a birthday trip!!!

I'll tell you about Paris in my next post. Have to drag this out a bit, after all. Here is the link to my Shutterfly site where you can see the first set of photos that I have finally gotten uploaded - it seemed to take forever, and they are still not all labeled, but I'm working on that.

http://wilkersonfamilyeuropeantour2010.shutterfly.com/#