Starlight Station May 25, 2008

Okay, so my recap of my vacation is finally over.  There was still plenty more to write about, but enough is enough.  Back to real life.  Today was the first day of our new series at KidsPointe, and IT WAS AWESOME!!!  Please don’t take my use of the Caps Lock lightly – it doesn’t happen very often.  The set looked great – see for yourself!

    

(Sorry for the picture quality – I’m back to using my camera phone again.)  The skit was really fun, and I got to use a puppet, so I was happy.  The kids seemed to really get into everything.  I’m telling you, this is not your mama’s children’s church.  We are going the extra mile to make sure the kids of Pointe North hear the message and have fun doing it.  Come check us out!

Keukenhof Slide Show May 22, 2008

I had about 150 pictures from the World’s Greatest Tulip Garden, so I thought a slide show would be the best way to share them.  So go pop some popcorn, get a soda, then come back and enjoy!    

     

Rome – Day Two May 20, 2008

The thing that kept occurring to me while we were in Rome was how old everything is.  This is Rome.  Paul’s Letter to the Romans.  What’s that weird word that doesn’t have any vowels?  Oh, yeah, Roman numerals.  It’s like I just realized that this is The Land Where The History Comes From.  On day two, we got up and walked to the Vatican Museum to check out the old stuff.

    

    

That last picture is a painting by Caravaggio, my favorite artist, by the way.  Of course, the most famous thing to see at the Vatican Museum is the Sistine Chapel, which I did see, but it cannot be photographed.  It was cool.  It was kind of like a famous person – it looked a little shorter than I imagined.  Next we went to St. Peter’s Basilica.  It’s called St. Peter’s because it is known as the burial place of Peter.  Peter from the Bible.  You can climb to the top of the dome and look out to see a beautiful view of the city.  It better be beautiful after 320 steps.

    

After this we walked some more so we could see more stuff – the Spanish steps, more churches, etc.   I won’t bore you with the pictures, but it was awesome!

Rome – Day One May 18, 2008

Sorry for the brief hiatus – I decided to take an impromptu trip to Atlanta to visit my folks.  Now we return to our regularly scheduled vacation-induced posting.

On Day Five of the vacation, Mandy and I woke up before the crack of dawn to get to the airport.  We took the earliest flight so that we would have most of the day in Rome.  The first thing we did was see the Colosseum.

    

We took a tour, and our tour guide was kind of funny.  His famous line was, “The Colosseum used to be covered with beautiful white marble.  If you want to know where is the marble, go to the Vatican.  Ask the Pope.”  Imagine this spoken with a pretty thick Italian accent.

Then we went to the Old Vatican.

    

The thing about Europe, especially the churches, is that everything is so beautiful.  There’s art everywhere you look.  The best way to sum up the trip to Rome is to say that we just walked our feet off trying to see everything.  I’ve already explained that I’m not good at remembering facts or useful information, but I do have a lot of pretty pictures.  Here’s some of them.

    

    

In the afternoon we took a tour of the Roman forum and the Palatine hill.

    

         

That night we walked back to the Colosseum and the Arch of Constantine because I wanted to see them all lit up.  We also went to the Trevi fountain.

    

    

Stay tuned for more Rome tomorrow.  (Have you ever noticed that “Rome” and “more” have the same letters?)

Neuleiningen and the Rhine May 14, 2008

On the third day we stayed relatively close to Mandy and Colin’s house.  We drove (in Colin’s new BMW) to a town called Neuleiningen and had lunch.  We ate outside, and the view was picturesque.  And the meal was delicious.

    

After lunch we drove to the Rhine River, hoping to take a cruise and see the castles on the hillside.  We arrived a little too late, so we decided to just drive along the river.  It is really hard to see casles when you are whizzing by them at 100 mph.  (Colin was a little excited about his new car.)  However we did get an close-up view of a bee on the windshield.

    

 Look close – you can see the stripes.  And the guts flying out of it.  Tomorrow – Rome!

Surprise Legoland May 14, 2008

This is the second time I am writing this post.  Something happened with my page yesterday, and in an effort to fix it, I deleted the first draft.  The gist of it was that when Mandy and I were driving back to her house from the castles, we stopped into Legoland.  Completely unscheduled, but really fun.  Here’s some pics:

                   

If that castle looks familiar, it’s because it’s a replica of the Neuschwanstein castle that I had just seen that morning.  A lot of the buildings had little scenes going on in front of them.  The white horse in the last picture kicked the little guy, and he said, “Owww.”  It was cute.  I was amazed that all this stuff was made out of Legos.  Really cool.

Neuschwanstein May 12, 2008

The second day of my European vacation was spent touring two castles in Bavaria.  Because my skills in geography are about equal to my skills in history, I didn’t even realize that we were going to see the Alps until I looked out the car window and saw this:

Sing with me – the hills are alive with the sound of music! (Ahh, ahhahhh, aahhh.)  Props to Hope’s camera – when I took this picture we were zipping around the curvy road at about 50 mph.

The weather was really beautiful as we toured the two castles, Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau.  The weirdest thing we saw was a platter that was given as a host’s gift.  It was round with a space in the middle where a round loaf of bread was placed as part of the gift.  They had the platter on display in a glass case with the bread still in it!  Several hundred year old bread.  Why?  Just tell me it had bread in it, and I can imagine what it looked like. 

Neuschwantstein is the castle that Walt Disney used for inspiration in the design of Cinderella’s castle.  Here’s some pictures so you can all see how beautiful both the castles were:

    

    

In the last picture you can kind of see some people hang-gliding/para-sailing or whatever.  There were at least 20 people up in the sky. 

This picture was taken from the castle looking down on the countryside:

If that was the view out of my window, I don’t think I would ever leave the house.

 

 

 

 

Rothenburg May 7, 2008

So I’m back! And all my belongings are safe and sound in my absence. Since I don’t usually have a lot of great blog topic ideas, I plan on stretching out the stories about my vacation until they last longer than the vacation itself. So here we go!
As soon as I stepped off the plane in Germany, my friend and I drove straight to a town called Rothenburg. *Warning – I am not a history buff, so any information that resembles a fact may not actually be a fact. When tour guides or my friend Mandy are trying to fill my mind with helpful or interesting knowledge, I’m usually thinking something like, “Ooh, there’s something shiny. I want to take its picture!* Anyway, Rothenburg has this wall around it that has been there since the Middle Ages. You can walk around the city on top of the wall and get a great view of the city itself and the countryside around it.  The whole place looks really Germany-y to me. My favorite part is the Kathe Wolfhart store. It’s a big Christmas store, and I love buying Christmas decorations. We kept bouncing back and forth across the street between the two locations, trying to decide what to buy. I also like the decorative iron signs for all the stores.  They were very unique.  Here’s some pictures.