A German Spring

I've been so negligent about posting for the past few months. My cousin is doing an "every day in July" blog post challenge, and although the thought of posting every day already wears me out, I do have to post something. So much has happened. I have no more excuses.

At the beginning of May, Matt and I planted our garden. I'll put up pictures in the next post and then you will see why I'm so in love with Matt and his gardening skills.

At the end of May, the 19-30 to be exact, Matt and I went to Germany for our first real family vacation. It was beautiful there this time of year, and the weather was perfect. It was green and sunny during the day, then cool in the evenings with little rain storms at night.

So we flew out of Salt Lake May 19th and into Frankfut, Germany the next day. You gatta' love international flights. We decided having a car would be much less expensive than taking trains, buses, and taxis everywhere we planned to go, so we picked up our little VW golf (which was really a good sized sports wagon) and took off. For the sake of trying to beat jet-lag, we didn't even drive to our hotel to check in until later that evening. We spent our first day traipsing around Frankfurt, eating ice cream, and checking out the interesting art and architecture.

The main square in Frankfurt. I love the trestle work on the buildings here.

This crazy building has a hole in it!!!

This is more than just a cute picture of Matt eating ice cream. Look at those junk sculptures in the back.
This was the entrance to an "art" park.

Another sculpture in the park depicting a flower as it grows. They looked like 70's chairs to me.

Then we settled in at our Inn, which was in a little town north of Frankfurt. There was a thunderstorm that night that shook the whole countryside and rattled you from the inside out.

This place was so cute and so very fun. It was also the perfect introduction to German hospitality.

The next day was a German national holiday, the day Christ ascended to heaven. Everything was closed except the churches, so we drove to Mainz and caught the first part of Mass as we peeked inside the cathedral there.

The Cathedral at Mainz.

A beautiful courtyard inside the Cathedral grounds.

The remains of a pre-holy holiday party we found outside of the Cathedral. This is the only trash I ever saw on the street in Germany.

Checking out the situation for this headless martyr. Yep! It's bad.

After a little lunch, we headed for one of Matt's most favorite mission areas, Worms. We saw the church were Martin Luther nailed his 95 Thises, ate a doener, and a very old, very cool Jewis graveyard.

Here is a statue depicting Martin Luther in the town park.

This graveyard was massive. This is just one slice of it. There was more behind me and much more to the right side under a forrest of trees. It was beautifully fixed up and very neat.

Then we drove back to Frankfurt just in time to catch the last session at the Frankfurt temple.

After a day of churches and graveyards, it was so nice to be here.

Okay, next time, castles on the river, a fast train to Mainz and a weekend with Matt's two favorite Germans.