August 12, 2015

From Belgium, we came across back into Germany to start working our way down the West side of the country.  Our first stop was Cologne where they have a huge, beautiful church in the middle of the city.  The first thing we did when we got into town was to find somewhere for lunch.  We let Hayden choose, so we ended up at Hard Rock Café (big shock!)  While we were eating, the waiter asked if we were in town for the gaming convention.  We said no, but I could already see in Adam’s head that our plans for the day where quickly changing!  We finished lunch and hopped online to find out where/what this convention actually was.  Turns out it’s the largest gaming convention in Europe and we were in town for the last day.  We ended up going over to the convention center and I have to admit, it was pretty cool.  The thing was HUGE!  It was in over 10 buildings in the convention center and had every type of game that you could imagine.  We walked around for a while and looked at everything.

Luckily for us, Hayden’s prayers were answered and there was a Minecraft section!  Of course, we had to get in line to play the game (like he doesn’t get to play it enough on all of the train rides!)  It was kind of fun because they were actually doing a Beta test on the new Windows 10 version of the game, so he was pretty excited to help test it out.

After the Minecraft section, we went to find some stuff for Adam to play too.  🙂  They both got to pick up the big weapons and show the bad guys who was boss!  lol

There is a new Star Wars game coming out soon, so they had lots of props set up from Star Wars.  The best part was where you could get your picture with the TIE Fighter and the Empire pilot.  It was pretty cool.  After that, we went over to play the new Star Wars characters on Disney Infinity.  I have a bad feeling that we are going to be getting a few new games when we get home!

Hayden also got to meet the characters from Assassin’s Creed.  I don’t really know much about the game, but the set area looked pretty cool!

Our train was supposed to leave at 5:30 pm, but there was no way that I could drag them away from the convention early, so we ended up spending the night in Cologne.  Luckily, we still had some Marriott points left, so we had a nice break and stayed in a hotel that night.  The next morning, we came back to the center of town where I wanted to see the big church….unfortunately, when we got there and I went to take a picture, we discovered that the camera broke!  boooooooo   😦  Despite not having pictures, the church was huge and amazing.

We made it to the train that afternoon and got to Frankfurt in just a few hours.  We  set up camp and stayed in that afternoon and planned for the following day.  The next morning, we got into town and decided to skip the churches/museums/etc and spent the day at the zoo.  They had a really nice zoo with tons of different animals.  It was a nice way to spend the day.  Hayden was mostly just excited to see the Okapis (since we didn’t get to the Congo in Africa to see them) and to eat a giant waffle covered in junk food!

From here, we are going south to Kaiserslautern to see our friends from Ft Bragg who are stationed here…YAY!!!!