October half term

Well, our two weeks of half term has been and gone. It was earlier this year, I know some schools have only just broken up this week. It was nice to have slightly different holidays to avoid the traffic jams and the crowded airports. Not so nice if you have children in different schools though.

We were in Fuessen, near Munich for a few days last week. I flew in with the boys and met A, who flew in from Dusseldorf at Munich airport. We had to wait for ages for the shuttle bus to take us to Thrifty rental car...this is one problem with getting rental car from a company that is not on-site at the airport! We missed the first one by a few minutes, later told we must have missed another whilst we waited at the bus stop ( can't quite believe this part ) and they are dispatching another shuttle bus right now. We got there almost an hour later.

On the drive to Fuessen, we drove pass a massive endless lake and were sooo excited to spot Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau castles from afar. H loved practising saying these names whilst I am useless at foreign words and probably spelt them wrong. If so, I apologise. This area is beautiful, with endless lakes, the bluest-green rivers and tall mountains; the autumn colours make the forest even more spectacular.

This is a photo of some houses in Fuessen along the river Lech.

Fuessen is bigger than we expected. We enjoyed walking around town and were bemused to see that a lot a lot of architectural features on buildings were painted on.

This is a photo of Fuessen museum. Can you spot the real part of the building and the trompe l'oeil. The coloumns, the ballustrade are painted on, so are the pediments above the windows.

Fuessen castle was spectacularly lit at night. We knew this because we went night-time geocaching in a nearby forest. It was fun following small reflectors to the geocache, I think we will probably set one up ourselves.

Well, that is day 1 of Germany, I'll tell you the rest later.