The Professor and Mary Ann

We got up in our quaint hotel and came downstairs to perhaps the most sensational breakfast we've ever had, and that is saying something. But we've never had a candlelit breakfast before, or one with personal jars of fruit salad and bottles of juice. Rob and I had looked at the menu at the Weisser Bock, but the fixed price menu was waaaaay above our budget. Too bad, because it was all Spanish-German, and we are Spanish-German foodies if ever there were some. So at least we got the swank breakfast offerings. The kids enjoyed it, but they probably would have picked Krispy Kremes or Count Chocula over the cold cuts and croissants and muesli if given the choice. We went to church at the LDS ward and had a good time. We came back with all of the students to this restaurant Rob had picked out the day before called Perkeo on the Haupstrasse: Perkeo was a jester with a legendary drinking ability. We had our own room and we got to order our own thing (usually for budgeting and serving...

On Monday we had a whole day with no meetings or activities. I checked the interwebs for prices and distances and presented to the family a Schwarzwald visit -- also known as the Black Forest. None of us had been, and we wanted to go to the Vogtbauernhof open air museum where they've moved a bunch of Black Forest farmhouses together so that you can see how people have lived here for 100's of years. It was a fairly long ride, and very windy and scenic at the end, and not so easy to find, but we had our GPS named Helga, in honor of the Isaaks, and we found it eventually. We went first to the woodworking shop. Each kid got to pick out something to make. Then Herr Lehmann helped them to get it done. Here he and Joss are drilling a hole into a helicoptery thing. This man was a treasure. Starting off the visit with power tools meant that the kids were excited for the rest of the day, and they were all justifiably proud of their cuckoo whistles and magic puzzles. He let them burn wha...

On Friday Rob went into Stuttgart and picked up our rental car. It was a brand new 7-passenger Ford Galaxy. We wanted to take the kids somewhere close, so we decided that Burg Hohenzollern would be our warm-up. Rob, Joss and I had come in 2009 and we knew where it was and what to expect. The kids were not excited. They want to play war games on the computer, watch the KiKa channel on TV and talk to their friends on Buzz. We got lost, found our way, parked our car, took the shuttle bus, and climbed through three rings of fortifications just like last time. It was about to rain just like last time. We finally got to the courtyard and there were two tours leaving immediately: an english tour or a kids' tour. We didn't have time to ask anything about them, we just stood in the back of the kids' tour line, figuring that the kids might complain less if it were geared toward them. The whole tour was about finding Princess Sophie Charlotte on her 10th birthday. We had two guides,...