Castles, castles everywhere.

Hey guys! Sorry we haven't been posting all that much- it actually takes more effort than we thought, with all the pictures and stuff, and lack of internet! But I'll catch you up on what happened these past couple days.

So... Monday. We got up, ate, and walked down to the Rhein (about 10 min. walk from our hotel) to do a cruise down the river! By the way our place is SO nice... it only has 10 rooms, so it's nice and small, and our room is the biggest one we have had yet, and we have a deck! So we cruised down the Rhein which was SO SO beautiful. The fall colours are gorgeous!

By the way, those are vineyards on the hill. I know, crazy steep! We cruised to a town called St. Goar and  walked up a hill to Borg Rheinfels, a castle/fortress from the 12th century!

It was sooo so cool! You could climb around pretty much anywhere, and there were passageways and stairwells everywhere which you needed a flashlight to get through. There were even these long tunnels only 3 ft. high that had thin slate roofs with which they used to put mines in to blow up enemies above ground. There are about 600 ft. of these tunnels left intact... we crawled partway through one, it was so scary! This picture is us going down one dark stairwell.

We had lunch in a restaurant near the fortress and then we drove our rental car to another castle, Borg Eltz.

This castle is actually still owned (and lived in) by the 33rd generation of the Eltz family! We were able to tour part of it, it was really interesting, but I have to say I liked the first castle better!

Tuesday was pretty much a train day. We had a leisurely morning of shopping and then we drove to the train station in Frankfurt and dropped the car off. Our first train to Munich was from 1:54-5:12, and the second one from Munich to Salzburg was from 5:23-6:57. Guess which train had a ten minute delay?? You got it. So we had one minute to get from our first train to our second train. We asked the conductor about changing our ticket, but he actually said they'd hold the train for us! Our first train actually came in about 5:17, but we didn't want to take any chances, so we speed walked it over to our platform. And we made it :) Here's Mads and I enjoying the beautiful German scenery out our train window.

So. Got to Salzburg. Took a taxi to our hostel which is WAY on top a mountain. The driver couldn't take us right to the door so we walked part of they way. Get to the hostel and no ones there. We buzz the buzzer and there's no answer. Nobody's inside (there's only 6 rooms). We phone them and there's no answer. So my dad decides to check the doors to see if any are open... there was one open so we assumed it's our room. So we texted our Pastor back home and asked him to check my dads email to see if we have a code from the owner for the lock box at the front where all the keys are. There was no email. It's about 8:30 by this time so we're all getting really hungry so we weren't really sure what to do cuz we didn't want to just leave our stuff there. Then we see there's a number on the front door that's different than the one we called. So we called and left a message and a minute later they texted us with a code! Woohoo!! So that wasn't so fun, but hey we got our room eventually! So we ate and went to bed.

In the morning we had breakfast and then walked around the old part of Salzburg. It's so pretty!!

This is the view from Hohansalzburg, a castle on a mountian in the city of Salzburg. It's the biggest preserved castle in Europe! The yellow building to the very left in the trees is our hostel! You can even take an elevator to get to it.

When we were walking around in the morning we came across some pretty cool things, like this statue of Mary. Behind her is a church. They're actually about 250 feet apart, but if you stand in the right place it looks as though the angels on the church are crowning her! So cool!

We then got some lunch from a market. They're so big on Fanta here, you can get it in every restaurant!

Afrer lunch was when we went  up to Hohansalzburg. It was really cool, although we were all tired and Madeline's still sick so it wasn't as enjoyable as Germany. After that we had dessert in a cafe, then went back down and did a bit of shopping. We came across the birthplace of Mozart! Pretty cool.

We went back up to our hostel (in the elevator!) and had supper that we picked up from the market and just chilled, then went to bed. The days are kinda starting to blur together... we've been to so many places in such a short time sometimes I forget which country I'm in! But I'm really loving seeing new places. It can sometimes get tiring, and anxious, but we've made it this far! So sad we're more than half over. Alright, talk to you all again soon!