Making Memories

From My travels

                             

Today is the first day of the rest of my life.

 I have 100% of the rest of my life to live.

Every King was once a helpless baby.

Every mighty tree was once a seed

Every great ocean began with a ripple…

And every mighty structure started out as a drawing.

It’s not where I am today that that counts, but where

I am going in the future with what I learned today that matters.

Well, this exciting adventure is on the downhill run. We will be home in our little town of Nanango this time next week. Who would ever have thought what an exciting time we had ahead of us when we set out on this great experience .And who would have ever thought that at our age we could take this journey and embrace all the experiences and run with it. We’ve tried everything( except kissing the blarney stone- I had good intentions) and enjoyed our new experiences.

We have been to many different places:

 A walking tour of Miltenberg.

A walking tour through the Palace at Wurzberg. What a magnificent place.
 Another walking tour, this time through Bamberg- a very picturesque place.

Our next day we visited Nuremberg, where we visited the Palace of Justice where the Nazi war trials were held in 1945/ 46. We went to church at Frauenkircke ( a catholic church). The service was in German and they sang the gospel (and it was very long). And we turned the latch three times  at the fountain for good luck ,so we would return again to Nuremberg.

And then Regensberg:. We took a boat ride along  through the Danube gorge  to the Weltenberg Abbey, tasted salty pretzel and drank dark beer. In the afternoon we did another walking tour and ate German sausages and saurkraut. That night before dinner we had Bavarian beer tasting. We were pretty beered out by the end of all that. And that night the entertainment was Bavarian folk music with a pretty crazy Bavarian who could play many musical instruments and made us laugh till we cried.

Our most exciting experience was being inside the  river lock and watching the water level rise 25m, and our ship sail out  the other side on a different level.We have to pass through 68 of these locks before we get to Budapest. But this one was particularly interesting because of the height the water had to climb to get us to the next level of water.The eventual height we had to get to was 1183mt above sea level before we got down the other side and into the Danube River.

After that we sailed up the Rhine / Danube canal on our way to the Danube River, We crossed a viaduct which was a bridge affair that crossed a four lane highway and we could see cars passing below us. All that happened in the space of about an hour. All the passengers were out on deck with cameras ready watching and enjoying these exciting experiences.

3/7/12 Today  we visited Salzberg- where Mozart was born, where “The Sound of Music” movie was made.We visited Mondsee (a lake) where the church was where Maria and Gerhardt were married in the movie. We ate Austrian sausage and apple struedal.

The puppy dog made out of towels sitting on the bed

Our waiter Ciprian dressed in Bavarian Costume He is really Romanian

The Town hall at Bamberg that straddles the river and looks like a ship.

Moving into the river lock and the 25m wall the water had to climb

  

A sign about opa. couldn't find one for Oma .In German

The Palace of Justice where the Nuremberg Nazi trials were held

The mad Bavarian. See his moustache

The church at Mondsee where Maria and Gerhart married in the "Sound of Music"

           

Sailing out the other side of the lock after rising 25m

This marker showed when we got to the highest level above sea level -1183m

This will probably be the last blog I will send before we go home because the internet is so difficult to manouvre. Tonight we are going to a concert in Vienna, I am so excited. Today we did a tour of Vienna. It is very lovely. We visited ANOTHER church- St. Stephen's Cathedral. They are all so different, It was finished in 1400's.


 Soon our dream will be over, but these lovely places will always live in my heart, I wish you peace. I am so glad that we at least, got to touch places so different from home- the country where our grandchildren have connections, and the countries where our ancestors came from. Love C.