We're back from Berchtesgaden...

We just got back to Prague about an hour ago from our weekend visit to Germany. We lucked out by gaining an hour this morning thanks to central Europe coming off daylight saving time. (I just looked in google and it appears that the US doesn't revert to standard time until next weekend. As of 2007 it is the first weekend in November).

I'll post several items over the coming days, so now I will just give an overview. There were two bad things that happened on the trip. First, while the hotel had wi-fi, the signal was so weak that it was not usable. So I couldn't post anything during the trip, and I couldn't check email, or news either (we had 18 TV channels in German).

The second thing was that the Eagle's Nest, Hitler's retreat, was closed for the season. I didn't realize it was a seasonal thing, and it looks like we missed it by just a week.

Still, we did lots of other things, and the town of Berchtesgaden is as quaint as a postcard. The whole area is. But more on that later.

Here is our hotel. I found it on the internet, and I chose it because it had a family apartment - a separate bedroom for Kathy and I, and a living room with a foldout couch for Noah. It also had a very small kitchenette with a fridge and stove. The cost was 100 Euros per night, which was considerably cheaper than the other hotels in the area. We had to pay in cash upon arrival - something that is more standard in Europe.















Here's Noah in front of the hotel. ("Here's the Spanish Inquisition on the side of the hotel." "Gee, I wasn't expecting the Spanish Inquisition").















Here's the view from a few yards away from the hotel. Like I said, the view was great just about everywhere. It had snowed the day before our arrival, so at elevation there was a lot of snow. In Berchtesgaden there was still snow on the roofs of buildings, but the temperature was about 50.



The Garmin performed very well. We actually disregarded it once because it directed us to leave the freeway about an hour southeast of Munich and we thought that it would be faster to stay on the freeway. 3 miles later traffic on the freeway was stopped due to construction. We apologized to Garmin and asked for a new alternate route. Garmin obliged and at the next exit took us on side roads around the construction. 15 minutes later we were back on the freeway at 150 kilometers per hour (93 miles per hour - I just found the conversion on google and had no idea we were going that fast. I had figured we were at about 80 MPH).

More tomorrow.