July 21, 2015

Yay…we’re in Germany!!  First off, the food is awesome!  We haven’t had a bad meal here yet!  We got to the city and found our campsite which was a little bit outside of the city, but was just fine.  It’s right off of the public bus line, but takes about 30 minutes to get into town.  We can’t really complain because it’s pretty cheap.  We spent the first day and a half walking around the city and checking out all of the buildings.  There are tons of really neat buildings with various histories.  Much of the city was destroyed during the bombing in WWII, but they have either been rebuilt or are in the process of being restored.  The town feels like what I would always think of as a European town, but it’s actually a very large city!  We found some great restaurants and loved just walking around.

The palace right in the city was really cool.  There was a huge courtyard with beautiful fountains and lots of really neat sculptures around the buildings.  Adam has decided that he would be okay living here.  🙂  It was free to walk around through the residence, so we explored all of the fountains and gardens for a while in the afternoon.

We were pretty excited to find that there was a bowling alley right near our campsite, so we made our way over there in the evening to check if they had open bowling.  We lucked out and it was only $15 for the 3 of us to bowl for an hour.  We played two games…I killed it on the first game, but then Hayden came back and kicked our butts in the second game.  It must have been his professional approach that you can see in the picture below.

The highlight of the city was getting to see our friends Vanessa and Torsten that we met on our safari in Africa.  We were so glad that we met them because they were the ones that suggested we come to Dresden and we’re so glad that we did!  We met up with them in the afternoon and they took us out to a castle in Moritzburg (just outside of Dresden).  The castle was really cool, but the best part were the grounds around the castle.  There were really beautiful trails through the woods where you could bike/walk to different parts of the grounds.  We went through the main castle as well as the “hunting lodge” about 1.5 km away.  It was a perfect afternoon to be out walking, so we really enjoyed it.  After the castle, they took us to dinner at an African restaurant which was great!  Hayden and I had a zebra steak!  I feel a little guilty about eating such a cute animal, but I suppose cows and pigs are cute too, but I don’t have any problem eating them!  lol

From here, we are going to head north a little ways up to Berlin for a few days.  There is so much to do there, so we will probably stay for a few days before taking off again.