GERMANY - DAY 13 We lounged around the hotel today and waved goodbye to many of the fellow tour group. We then decided to send home all the books and other things we don't need or want to lug around so we headed to a local post office and sent them home. Holy moly, talk about expensive. Hopefully we won't have to do that again. When we got back to the hotel it was time for us to depart and downgrade to the hotel we were staying in for the night before heading t...

GERMANY - DAY 12 We left out hotel and headed off to see a cuckoo demonstration. They were amazing. The intricate carvings were impressive. We were informed that during winter when the village is covered in snow and the temperatures are freezing, the wood carvers sit in the cuckoo shop and carve the various faces for the clocks. Each piece of wood on the front of each cuckoo clock is made by a different person. It takes five to six weeks to make one clock. A c...

GERMANY - DAY 11 This morning we left Munich and traveled towards the beautiful Alps. We stopped at a quant village of Oberammergau. There we saw buildings painted depicting fairytales or religious images. They were gorgeous. The mountains in the background and this tiny village, what a place to live. Once every decade, they perform a seven hour play called 'The Passion'. Legend has it that when the plaque was spreading through Europe, the people of Oberammerg...

GERMANY - DAY 10 Pasqual and I left the girls with Grandad and we headed with a small group to Dachau Memorial Site, the first concentration camp that opened immediately after Hitler's rise to power in 1933. We arrived just as the camp was opening so we were able to walk around this erie place. It was very chilling seeing the conditions that people where exposed to. I never realised there were so many different minorities persecuted by Hitler. Basically if you...

GERMANY - DAY 9 We left Nuremberg and traveled into Rothenburg. We wandered around looking at the medieval buildings. We looked through Kathe Wohlfahrt. It was a wonderful world of exquisite decoration and gift ideas for the Christmas holidays including nutcrackers and incense smokers, pyramids and music boxes as well as beautiful ornaments made of wood, glass and pewter. I could have gone crazy and bought so much stuff for Christmas but I restrained myself an...