Hohenzollern Castle

After we visited Tübingen, we planned to drive down a little further South to see the Hohenzollern castle. The night before we found google maps to all our locations, but that morning the wireless internet was down in our hotel and we couldn't print them out. So, we decided to rely solely on our GPS, which worked beautifully for our first location, but we had a little more trouble with the castle. So we drove to the city where it is located and just sort of started driving toward the castle. The only English tour of the day was at 2pm and we were pushing it to get there on time. So after roaming around on back roads for a while, we stopped and asked two older ladies if they spoke English and could help us find the castle. They said they spoke a little bit and told us how to get there (we were very close) and as we were leaving I said, "Danke Schön" (Thank you) and then I said (Get this!), "ADIOS"! I still can't believe I said that! Matt and I laughed until our sides hurt. I don't think they knew Spanish and hopefully they didn't hear me. Mortifying "stupid American" moment. What's the Speech Pathology term for that, Carole?
So, we visited the Hohenzollern Castle, which you can learn more about HERE.
Once again, sorry for all the scenery, but we are using our blog to share with family and to help us remember our time here.
We weren't allowed to take pics inside the castle, so there are a lot outside and of the amazing view.


Here we are in front of one of the doors of the castle:

Isaac and Daphne were very excited to visit a real castle. Daphne hoped there would be real princesses inside. I tried to prepare her, but she was insistent and excited. Once we went inside, she was so excited about all the things to see that she was distracted from her idea of real princesses. (Thankfully!) We did get to see paintings of some of the princesses and queens who lived there, as well as many of the kings (none of whom were exactly Prince Charming, if you catch my drift.) We also saw a beautiful gown that one of the queens wore when she met Napoleon. It was inlaid with real silver and weighed almost 60 lbs! That's like wearing Isaac around all day! Isaac was excited to see the real armor and swords as well as this canon:


So even though we didn't get to take pictures inside the castle, we were very impressed. It was so amazing. Imagine a picture book version of a castle and this is it in real life.

After our guided tour inside the castle, we walked around the castle grounds and looked at all the statues of previous German Emporers and saw their little private cemeteries. We stopped in many of these little corners because Isaac wanted to pretend he was an archer shooting arrows from the top of the castle.


The view was positively incredible. We weren't able to video up here, but I wish we could have- it was so gorgeous. The forest is so dense and beautiful. As we walked around, we kept reminding the children not to lean over the edge as there weren't any safety bars. They wanted so much to see that this was hard to remember.

And here are Isaac's feet dangling over the edge, giving me a heart attack!