Regensburg

This weekend we went up to Regensburg, Germany, to visit Peter's mother as she heads back to Maine in a few days. Regensburg is a beautiful place, the old city being a UNESCO World Heritage Site and dating back to the middle ages. It's filled with cobble stone streets, small alleyways, and amazingly old buildings. At the same time, it's not a huge tourist destination so you can wander the streets without the mobs of tourists that you sometimes find in Salzburg. There's a lot that can be said about Regensburg, but these pictures give you an idea of what it's like.

We decided to drive instead of taking the train because it looked like driving would be at least an hour faster than taking the train. It was faster, only about three hours instead of four and a quarter, but I think I prefer trains where you can walk around and pay no attention to directions and end up where you want to be without any real effort. One thing we learned about our Citroën is that it gets great mileage! Regensburg is about 220 kilometers (137 miles) from Salzburg. There is no direct Autobahn, but lots of little highways that take you through beautiful countryside. The Citroën dashboard has a display under the time and outside temperature for the number of kilometers your tank of gas can take you. With a full tank, the display said we could drive 600 kilometers before tanking up. The interesting thing is that it takes into account your driving efficiency in calculating the distance, and it is constantly adjusting. While we were getting out of Salzburg in stop-start traffic, the readout dropped to 580 kilometers because we were getting no where slowly, but once we cleared the city and were cruising along, the readout kept climbing up and up! Upon our return to Salzburg, after driving more than 450 kilometers, we still have 380 kilometers to go before we need to tank up. We used less than a half a tank of gas for the whole adventure!

Other than exploring the city (which really didn't excite Nikolas too much), we headed to a neighboring town to visit Trampoline (in German it's pronounced Tramp-oh-leen-eh), an indoor playland for children. It was a most unusual experience, and Nikolas loved every minute of it. The lobby/shop/check-in-desk had the same sort of feel as a sleazy bowling alley with bad lighting and formica-topped everything. Attached to this area were two enormous field houses which looked to have been an indoor carpeted(?!) tennis center at some time. And in the field houses were carnival rides and crazily enormous bouncy-castle-type things and bungee jumping (for older kids), a volcano-shaped climbing/sliding thing, and a bank of trampolines. There was even an indoor roller coaster!