Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Happy Halloween!


A few days before Halloween, we headed down to Frankenstein Castle (its real name) in Baden Wurttemberg which is around Darmstadt area with some friends of ours and had a blast. The castle transformed into a haunted house of sorts and was crawling with creepy ghouls and monsters. Let's just say the adults love it, the kids...well, not so much.


On the left is a cool pix of JJ and I inside one of the cages within the castle. As you can see in the pix, Julia clung to my side the entire night. Hey, first time for everything.


After the trip to the castle, Jen and JJ went home and I headed to Grafenwoehr for a week for a work related trip. Graf, as the local army guys call it, is a bustling training ground for our Germany based soldiers and I was there to plan an exercise for next year. The trip wasn't much to write home about but the cool thing about Graf is that it was once a training ground for the German soldiers during WWI and WWII. After 1945, Graf, including the rest of Bavaria fell into the hands of the Americans and we've held onto this post ever since. As such, many of the half timber houses remain intact and are still used today. In fact, the centerpiece for the post is what they call the tower. This thing is about 300' high and is extremely ornate. I've never seen anything like it. It was one of those "Only in Germany" moments.


On a different note, we are now officially at our halfway point for this assignment. Thus far, our family has visited France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic, Germany,and Ireland. I can tack on England, Turkey, and Portugal as solo trips. Not too bad. Anyhow, we are headed down to the Alps soon to mark the occasion. We plan on enjoying the newly fallen snow and will be sure to post some pix.

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