Side Trip to Rothenburg, Germany

On Saturday, we woke up early to catch a train from Munich to Rothenburg, a small, medieval town about 3 hours away.  Figuring out the trains was interesting, when the announcement were all in German, and I had to figure out where we needed to get off to switch trains, since we had 3 connections.  We almost missed a few of our trains because they were late arriving and we had very little time between trains! But we made it, and when we got there it was turning out to be a beautiful day.  We walked through the cobblestone streets to find lunch.  We went to a little restaurant that very much reminded me of my grandparent's house, for some reason! I'm not sure what it was, but it felt very homey!  I just had some soup, and my first apfelstruedel with ice cream. It was very yummy. :)  We had found a map, and after we ate we figured out what we wanted to see.  We started to wander around and explore a bit.  We found out that they were setting up for some type of run later on in the day in the city center, so it was quite busy!  We went into one of the famous Christmas markets, and it was insane! So much Christmas! I'd say we spent the better part of an hour in there, just looking!  They had anything and everything Christmas related, such as Nutcrackers of all shapes and sizes, giant decorated Christmas trees, the largest selection of ornaments I've ever seen, AND a German Christmas Museum!  We just wandered around taking it all in.  We decided against going in to any of the other ones, since they were so huge!  After that we wandered down and found a park with a great view of the countryside and part of the city.  We walked atop the wall and watchtowers that surrounded the city.  We found a sweet little park with an AWESOME swing (see my pictures!) and we played some.  We spent most of the day wandering around and finding some sweet secrets passageways and little courtyards.  We even found some cats!  It was a very pretty city, but there wasn't a whole lot to do (that was free anyways), so we headed back into Munich in the late afternoon.