Bamberg- "The City of Beer" (and so much more!)

I found a great Groupon deal for a short getaway to Bamberg, Germany.  Bamberg is a medium sized town, just a bit north of Nuremberg. It is in the Franconian region of Bavaria and was first mentioned in 902 AD.  It was built on seven hills (like Rome)  giving it a beautiful skyline along with its many steeples.  There was hardly any war damage, so it's still very original.  The entire old city center is a UNESCO world heritage site!

Kyle and I brought Gizmo along for our two night getaway.  It was a short and beautiful two and a half hour drive from our place.  We got lucky our first day there with pretty warm temperatures, and even a few peeks of sun!  When we arrived, we stopped in the tourist info center to buy a beer tasting package.    Bamberg is definitely a city for beer lovers!  The small town has 8 breweries, and over 80 breweries in the surrounding area. Wow!  Our beer tasting package gave us info about the historic breweries in Bamberg and gave us each a beer stein and 5 vouchers for beers at any of the breweries. (Not just tastes, half liters!)

The old Rathaus, or Town Hall (1386)

When the people weren't allowed to build it on land, they built it on water instead!

By that point, we were ready for lunch and our first tasting.  We went to Bamberg's most well known brewery and restaurant, the Schlenkerla Brewery and Tavern.  It's been around since 1405 and is located in an awesome, old, crooked half-timbered building.  Their specialty is rauchbier, or smoked beer. It was very good!  They even have a seasonal Lentbier, only made and sold during Lent.  Leave it to Germany to have a special beer for Lent!  (In historical context, it actually makes sense.  It's a very hearty, filling beer that people drank while they were fasting for Lent.  Beer was much safer to drink than water anyways!)  We also had a great traditional German lunch.  I had a beef roast with horseradish cream sauce, and Kyle had pork goulash with spätzle. It was very delicious, and very filling!

Goulash and Lentbier-it doesn't look like we're fasting, does it?

We spent that afternoon and evening wandering around the old town, popping in and out of old churches, and enjoying the weather before it turned on us.  We enjoyed another drink at Bamberg's newest microbrewery, Ambräusianum, then headed to check into our hotel before grabbing dinner.  (Gizmo was with us the entire day, even in the restaurants!  It's great that Germany is so dog friendly!)  We had some good old schnitzel and used another drink voucher at Brauerei Spezial, another great historic brewery that has been brewing since 1536.

The next day was very cold and blustery, but luckily it didn't rain!  After a nice breakfast at the hotel, we headed back to the tourist information place to pick up a guided audio tour.  We really geeked it up with our headphones and audio guide hanging from our necks.  It was worth it though!  It walks you around town, showing you the highlights and telling you the history.  Learning the history and significance behind the places that you visit gives it a lot more meaning than looking at it, saying "Wow," and then moving on.  We used another drink voucher for lunch at Brauerei Fässla which has been brewing since 1649.  It was another great, hearty German meal along with our very refreshing lagers.

The Dom (1237)

The rose garden at the Neue Residenz

Enjoying the view of Michaelsberg Abbey

Part of the Alte Hofhaltung, or Old Palace

The old fisherman's quarters

We stopped back at the hotel to rest our feet and for a quick cat nap before heading back out, just to wonder around and enjoy the sites.  A good cup of coffee was high on our list of priorities after our nap.  We had some great coffee and a sinfully delicious snack at a cute little cafe and bar.  (We eat really healthy when we're at home, I promise!)  Just a little side note:  European bars and cafes usually advertise what brand of coffee they serve.  I've found the Italian brand Lavazza to be one of the best.  It's what I buy to have at home, and if the barista knows what they're doing, it's always an amazing cuppa joe!

We checked out Mahrs Bräu to use our last beer voucher before heading back to the hotel for dinner. We had a Weisse bier, or wheat beer that was very tasty!  Our Groupon voucher came with a four course dinner at the hotel, so we dined there that evening.  The dinner was actually very good, and they gave us five courses instead of four.  It also came with a glass of the local sekt, which is German champagne.  On the menu was smoked beef with pesto and onion bread, beef broth and vegetable soup, grilled chicory and shrimp salad, steak with mushrooms and potatoes, and white chocolate mousse.  It was very nice!

We headed out the next morning and hit a surprise snowstorm.  It was very unexpected, so the roads were not salted and even the autobahn was covered in snow and down to one lane in places.  There were some of the biggest flakes I've ever seen!  Kyle will tell you that I had a scowl on my face throughout the snowstorm, because I'm extremely sick of winter and being cold.

Not cool!

We cannot wait to go back to Bamberg during the summer.  There are a couple of rose gardens that should be amazing, and of course the biergartens in the summer would be a highlight!  It was another trip that did not disappoint!

Winter Fun in the Swiss Alps

Kyle had a stretch of several days off of work, so we had to do some traveling!  We tried to find someplace that would be warm, but as it turns out, there is nowhere even remotely warm in Europe in February.  Instead, we decided to embrace winter by heading to the Swiss Alps.  We stayed in an apartment in a very small town in eastern Switzerland on the northern edge of the Alps.  It was only a two hour forty minute drive from our house.  We rented a great apartment in a new chalet, complete with a fireplace and hot tub.  Sounds like the making of a great trip!

The apartment

We arrived around 3 in the afternoon on our first day.  As we were making our way to the apartment, we couldn't believe the road that it was on!  The road was very narrow and only one lane as it twisted around hairpin turns up the side of a mountain.  At first we wondered if we were driving on a walking path!  The road was very steep, so it had containers of grit and snow shovels strategically placed. The further up we drove, the more the snow started to accumulate, making Kyle very happy! We spent the first evening relaxing by the fire and hot tubbing it, while we figured out a plan for the rest of our trip.

Night view from our place

We were very close to the border of Liechtenstein; the country of only 36,000 people and 62 square miles, which is slightly smaller than Washington DC.  We headed there our first full day. On our way, we stopped in the quaint little Swiss town of Walenstadt on the Walensee lake.  We walked around and admired the clean little town, and made our way to see the lake.  It is absolutely stunning. The sparkling, crystal clear water is surrounded by mountains and vineyards.  There were a lot of ducks, loons, and a couple of swans to entertain us there for a while.  We love watching birds, and I always kick myself for not bringing along stale bread!

The town of Walenstadt

Beautiful Walensee

From there we headed on to Liechtenstein.  It is a beautiful country with the Rhine River running through the center of a valley surrounded by mountains.  It was a gorgeous drive, and we enjoyed stopping to take pictures of castles looming above the small towns.  We crossed the Rhine valley and then the mountain ridge on the other side.  As we climbed in elevation, the snow once again started to pile up.  We saw a bus of school kids unloading, all wearing snow and ski gear.  What a different life than we knew when we were kids!

Liechtenstein

On the other side of the mountain was a complete winter wonderland.  We parked in tiny town called Steg and were ready for lunch.  We were heading to a restaurant in an Inn that we had heard about called the Berggasthaus Sücka.  We bundled up in the car, then headed up the kilometer long path uphill to the Inn, since you can't get to it by a road! It was a fun and beautiful little hike.  The entire time, there was a gentle snowfall.  They had about three feet of snow on the ground already!  As we made it up to the Inn, you could hear kids playing and tobogganing down the hills.  At that point we were cold and hungry, and a pot of bubbly cheese fondu hit the spot perfectly!

Tiny town of Steg

Hiking up to the Inn for lunch!

View from the Inn

Perfect little snowflakes!

Mmmmm, hot, bubbly cheese!

After lunch instead of hiking back down to the car, we tobogganed down the toboggan run instead! You borrow one of their old fashioned wooden toboggans, and leave it in a shed at the end.  It was both of our first times tobogganing, so it was interesting!  We rode down together, with Kyle in the front filming as we went, while I was hanging on to him shouting and being a backseat driver.  It's actually quite a bit harder than it looks, but definitely a lot of fun!  Kyle got a nice big hunk of snow up his pants leg!

From Liechtenstein, we headed back to Switzerland to Mount Säntis, the highest peak in northeastern Switzerland at 2502 meters above sea level.  (On our way there, I got locked in a bathroom.  There wasn't even enough space for me to crawl under the door!  What fun that was!)  Since Säntis is on the northern edge of the Alps, it takes the brunt of the weather from the north.  It has it's own micro climate that makes it snow there A TON!  As we were climbing in elevation to the base of the mountain, the snow was getting higher and higher, until finally it was higher than our car!  It was like driving through a canyon of snow!  (Kyle's level of giddiness directly correlated with the height of the snow.  If you know Kyle, you know that he's a snow-aholic and this was his dream come true!) The roads were in really good shape until we were about 2 kilometers from the base of Säntis.  Our VW Jetta was really put to the test getting up to the parking lot!

Once we were parked, the first thing we had to do was snap some pictures of the snow that was higher than our heads! It was pretty unreal! We actually couldn't see the huge mountain right in front of us because it was still snowing really heavily. We went into a hotel called Berghotel Schwägalp, which is pretty much the info center for the area, since there's not much else there. We had some coffee and Black Forest cake in the restaurant before heading out for our evening hike.  In the forest area by the hotel, they have a loop trail that they light by lantern on weekends.  The snow was falling gently in big, fluffy flakes, and it was so quiet and peaceful.  There was about five feet of snow on the ground, so you're actually walking on packed down snow three or four feet above the ground! Walking along the lantern lit trail during twilight was like finding Narnia.  It just seemed surreal. About halfway through was a snow covered hut magically set up with hot orange punch,  just in time to warm up our numbing fingers!

The snow was over our heads!

Our beautiful, peaceful lantern lit walk

Warming up with hot punch

Hello, Narnia!

The next day we headed out for more winter fun!  We went to another snow paradise called Rigi Mountain, very close to Lake Lucerne.  We parked at the base of the mountain, and took the cog train up to the top.  The train had a few stops on the way up the mountain, in tiny towns and guest houses buried halfway in snow.  We passed waterfalls made of blue tinted ice and of course, more and more snow as we neared the top.  It was like a blizzard at the top of the mountain.  You couldn't see very far because of white out conditions.  That doesn't stop the Swiss people from having their winter fun! On Rigi mountain and throughout Switzerland there are tons of places for skiing, tobogganing, cross country skiing, and snow shoeing.  

At the top of Rigi

Since we grew up in the flat lands, we haven't had much opportunity for skiing, so we went for the tobogganing and are saving the skiing attempts for less dangerous conditions, preferably where we won't be able to fall off the side of the mountain!  However, the tobogganing was pretty intense!  The course was just over four kilometers long (about 2 and a half miles) down the side of a mountain. There were a lot of twists, turns, jumps, and steep hills and an edge with nothing to stop you from going over the side of the mountain!  (In the States, they definitely would have made you sign a waiver!)  It was snowing really hard and pelting you in your face the entire way down, and at some points you just really couldn't see!  I did some feet dragging to avoid going off the side, and Kyle went over a big hump in the path and ended up rolling down the hill for a ways!  Despite all of that, it was a lot of fun and quite a rush!  We rode the train around a bit more, and got off at a small village not far from the peak.  It had a hotel with an awesome thermal bath outside, a lot of amazing chalets, and of course, tons of snow!  That evening we really made good use of the hot tub to take the chill out of our bones!

In the little chalet village on the mountain

We spent our last day of winter fun back at Säntis.  When Kyle knows that there is someplace near with that much snow, just try and keep him away!  The temperature at the base of Säntis was about 17 degrees, and we were heading to the top via cable car, so we were bundled up in many layers.  I had on  long johns, jeans, snow pants, a t-shirt, a hoody, a down coat, a scarf, a hat, a hood, leg warmers, snow boots and three pairs of socks!  I was grateful for every layer at the top!  It was frigid with a really strong wind.  It took about 10 minutes to reach the peak by cable car.  We were lucky and had some sunshine while we were up there.  We were above the clouds, and could just see the highest peaks rising above the layer of clouds.  It's like we were on top of the world!  There was 19 feet of snow at the top, which kind of blows my mind.

Can you find the door we used?

Check out the hiking paths of some crazy people!!

Weather station.  I'm guessing the wind comes mainly from one direction!

The hotel, closed for the season for obvious reasons

Once we got back down to the base of the mountain, we headed out for a nice winter hike through the 5 feet of snow.  They keep several paths through the snow packed down, so that hikers can make it without snow shoes.  It was a beautiful hike, and it didn't stop snowing once!  We warmed up with apple strudel in the hotel afterwards before heading back to the apartment.  There was quite a bit of snow at the apartment while we were gone, and we had a lot of trouble making it up the road.  We even had to put our new snow chains to use!  Remember it was a one lane road, and as Kyle was trying to put them on (first time ever putting chains on a vehicle) two cars came from the other way. That made it a bit of a stressful situation!

Geared up for a winter hike, on about 4-5 feet of packed down snow!

I spy, a barn roof!

We definitely found a winter wonderland, and will probably head to Switzerland every winter that we're here.  We did learn a few things about the Swiss people while we were there.  They're very nice people, but really mean drivers!  They tailgate like mad, even up steep, snowy, winding mountain roads.  Not cool.  They also really know how to live it up in the winter!  When we lived in Indianapolis and Maryland, if the weather forecast called for five feet of snow over a week or so, we all know what would happen.  First, people run to the grocery store and pick the shelves bare of every last morsel of food.  Then everyone would run next door to the Lowes or Home Depot and buy all of the shovels, blowers, flashlights, generators, and all batteries, whether they had anything to put those batteries in or not.  Then they would fill their bathtubs with water and watch the news about the weather and tweet about it while huddled under blankets.  Not in Switzerland.  Five feet of snow? Just another average day for them. It's just a good excuse for them to get outside and have fun!  I guess they have to embrace it, or they'd be in for it!  Kyle would love to live somewhere that regularly has five feet of snow on the ground.  I guess he'll just have to settle for visiting it, which is fine by me!