School in Sicily

Isaac took these one day.  Jess loves her souvenir from Zell am See.  I think looking at school work through the goggles gives you special math powers.  

Leaving Ingolstadt

Here is a selection of what we had to either get on the plane or mail to ourselves. Taking school along with us created a lot more baggage.  Not to mention crossing over from hot summer to cold winter clothes.  We were rather nomadic for a full 12 months.  This is the hallway.

This is the living/dining/Isaac's bedroom.  That big box resting on the little table has our big Mac computer.  That poor box started in Colorado Springs, went to Germany, then Italy AND on to Dubai.  We had to reinforce it more and more each time, but the computer made it without incident.  We couldn't find another box that size to replace it once we left the States.

Now we are waiting for the train to take us to Nürnberg.  Matt fly out of München.  If we matched his flight, arranged by L3, we would have had to pay over1500 Euro.  Verus, if we took a train to Nürnburg (same distance from Ingolstadt) and flew from there, it was less than 500.  Significant.  So Matt dropped us off at the train station and we met him in Sicily later that day.  

 Yeah, it's a bad picture of Isaac, but better than nothing.  He is cold, but enjoying his last Germany bakery breakfast for who knows how long.  Getting luggage through airports is so much easier now than it was when we moved to Germany the first time with 3 kids under the age of 5.

Wonnemar

I need to put this in before a whole year has gone by.  I am playing catch up with pictures from last year in preparation to upload the blog and print the book for 2011, now that it's halfway into 2012.  There are several events that got skipped over for lack of time in the midst of moving between countries (twice).  I'll put them in here for a few days before moving them to their proper chronological spots.

Our time in Ingolstadt was unique.  We had no playdates (with one exception).  We had no scouts, dance, soccer, piano lessons, activity days, mutual or anything.  (Isaac did do one service project with the other two young men.)  We had serious family time.  We traveled quite a bit on Matt's days off, but after school was done for the day we often got restless in our tiny apartment.  We went to parks when it wasn't raining.  We walked to bakeries.  And every Thursday we went to Wonnemar, the wonderful indoor pool for two hours when Matt got home from work.  We LOVED Thursdays.  We started making it our Döner day for lunch as well to try and keep from starving while swimming and playing hard later.  Even with a big lunch, we almost always were still ravenous afterwards and would often pick up a couple amazing pizzas to take home.  I only took my camera the last week, not wanting to ruin it.  But it was such an important part of our Germany time, I had to document it.

The weather in Germany encourages indoor pools and they always seem to do them up well.  There are lap pools of course, but so much more.  This one had 6 slides, a wave pool, and heated outdoor section.

Standing in front of the wave pool.  It would start every 15 minutes.  The kids are looking in the direction of the lap pool.  Matt and I would swim laps first while they went on as many slides as they could.  We built up our stamina week after week.  One of the last times we went, Matt dropped us off early because of a late work meeting and met us there later.  Because we had extra time, I decided to see if I was capable of completing the swimming part of an ironman.  It took me 2 hours, but I swam 2.5 miles. 

Also not pictured is the awesome outdoor pool.  It is much bigger area than the Azur in Ramstein.  There is a small lap area and different water features that take turns going off and on--big shower sprayers, spitting fountains, and best of all the whirlpool.  There are super powered jets that really PUSH the water and you around a big circle.  We loved to all go out there and play when it was running.  The kids loved trying to hold onto the edge for as long as they could before being swept away and then grab onto Matt.  He would circle with them and then help push them to the edge.

Jess is bursting with happiness.  She loves the pool.

We spent the most time on the tube slide.  The tubes are a little heavy and you sure get a work out carrying them up all those flights of stairs over and over and over.  A great thing about German pools is their lack of life guards dictating on the slides.  There were green and red lights at the tops of the other slides so you know when to start, but the tube slide was a free for all. 

Here they are coming out of the back hole slide.  

This is the long fast slide.  We all tried it many, many times.  There is another yellow fast slide, shorter and steeper, but I don't have a picture of it.  

 

Makenna could regularly body surf all the way to the edge.  

Makenna catching a wave.  

It's a short, simple slide, but has great scope for imagination.  The only rule is "no standing".  Almost anything else goes.  The kids had loads of fun making up different ways of going down.  Backwards, sideways, belly, back, spinning, three in a row, three in a chain. . . .  

And this is what our hands look like when it's time to leave.  

Aldi Park

One of the kids' favorite parks was one Matt and I stumbled across on a run during our first couple weeks there.  We called it the Aldi park because it was in a  neighborhood across from the Aldi we went to most often.  Sometimes I would let them play while I ran to grab a few things.  There was a zip line, spinning barrel, a ping pong table, a super fast and curvy slide and fun perpendicular tire swings.

Some More Munich Pictures

The girls practiced a few primary songs in German every time we drove in the car getting ready for our last Sunday which was Stake Conference.  It was in München and they were having a children's choir.  We never got them entirely memorized, so they used their papers still, but I was so happy they were willing to try this on short notice knowing only two other children.

I snapped these with my phone during their rehearsal.  

The rest of these are from an afternoon at the zoo.  The seals were really splashing and putting on a show of their own.  I think they were having fun getting the watchers wet.

Matt, Makenna and Isaac going across the bridge. 

Jess had to sit on every animal statue.  

The monkeys were really active too.  A little too active because all my shots ended up blurry except for this one.  

"Schonblick Stadt"

We found a fabulous restaurant with a gorgeous view the first month we were back in Germany.  We decided to go back during the day and see what there else was to see in the town.  We tried and eventually succeeded in getting up to the castle.  It had been converted into a museum.  There were limited signs in English, but the exhibits were still interesting to view.  Matt filled us in on the details of particular subjects.  I don't know why I didn't bother taking a picture of the castle??

Jess enjoyed the fresh air on the drive there.  

This is looking into a DEEP well.  

Big contraption to help raise and lower?  

We saw some wicked looking mushrooms, tan, black and PURPLE!  

Roman Museum

We drove by a big building claiming to be a Roman Museum every time we took the direct route to "Stammtisch" but it wasn't till near the end of our time in Ingolstadt that we actually visited.  It's too bad really because I would have been more likely to write about it right away instead of letting more than half a year slip by erasing too much info from my memory.

I have no idea any more why I took these two pictures, but I'm including them for any German speakers with a flare for Roman history who wants to figure it out.

We all had audio guides as we walked along.  I somehow don't have any pictures from the beginning.  One of the best parts was a full scale reconstruction of half of a Roman house including a hung door with a lock and key that you could try locking and unlocking.  The big key could double as a weapon if you got into a scuffle on the street, but it really worked.   

There were bones showing evidences of operations and battle.  There was jewelry.  There were coins, tools, weapons, pottery.  All of the artifacts were found in the nearby countryside.  Remember the oldest running festival at the tiny town that gets hundreds of thousands of visitors that we went to?  That festival has ties back to a Roman horse market, probably the same Romans that left some of their stuff for the museum 2000 years later.  

Another fascinating and mind-blowingly impressive thing was the model showing how they built a massive bridge to span the Danube (Donau auf Deutcsh).  They had to block the water in order to dig down and anchor it, and that was just the easy beginning.  It seems like SO much planning and work, but transportation was key to their empire building and maintaining.  Um, I don't have a picture of that.

I do have pictures of the boat found semi-preserved in the mud. Isaac and Makenna are sitting in the reconstructed part.  The bottom picture shows the actual remains.  It's not too wide, but very long. 

The only other pictures I have are of what they thought the Roman garrison looked like.  The detail was impressive.  You can picture the little soldiers getting up to mischief like in Night at the Museum.