This morning we spent our last morning having breakfast in beautiful Oberammergau. Since our group was staying right in Oberammergau, we were the last to be picked up today. Our day started with Augsburg. We spent a bit of time exploring a little bit on our own, but then we were split into two groups for a city tour. We were in Sylvia's group and she was a most awesome guide!

Sylvia gave us a great history of Augsburg and one of our first stops was the Palace of Jacob Fugger, the richest man in Augsburg. While we were walking to the palace, we found out that if you lived on the main street, you were taxed by the number of windows you had facing the street. That was how you could tell who had the most money! If a family found they were not able to pay their taxes, they would board up enough windows to bring their taxes down to an affordable amount. Can you imagine?

From the Palace we headed off to the Church of St. Anne where Martin Luther stayed for about a week while he was in Augsburg. The church is undergoing renovations/restoration so there was a lot of construction going on. However, on the second floor of the church, we saw some artifacts from Martin Luther, including a copy of the 95 theses he nailed to the church door. It was quite interesting!

We were given some more history of the area and made our way back to meet up with the rest of our group to grab lunch before heading out to Rothenburg. Augsburg is a very beautiful city, but it seemed more modern than the other cities and villages we've been visiting, even though most of it dates back hundreds of years.

About halfway between Augsburg and Rothenburg, we stopped in a quaint medievel town called Dinkelsburl. It was very beautiful, but the reason for our stop was a rest area, not a tour. Beautiful or not, this town is in dire need of more water closets at their bus parks!!! Now, there were 46 of us on the bus (48 if you count our tour director Robert and our driver Marco).....a majority of these are women. There was one stall......need I say more?? Needless to say, our 15 minute stop was anything but! However, we made it out and were again on our way to Rothenburg.

Arriving in Rothenburg, everything was looking much different than what we'd been seeing....the buildings were more medieval than we'd seen in Austria and Bavaria. However, the big change was, this city had been surrounded by a wall.....and that wall is still intact today. What a sight to behold when you walk up to this massive wall knowing that there is a whole city behind it!

As of today, this was my favorite city so far! These houses and shops are so beautiful, I couldn't stop taking pictures! We were on our own here today, so I did a lot of wandering. The largest Kathe Wolfahrt Christmas Store is located here, so I did spend some time there, but most of my day was spent taking pictures of all the great buildings in this awesome village. We had about an hour and a half to explore here, but I could have stayed for another few days! After taking a bit of a detour (Robert missed one of the exits out of the fortress wall!) and a long walk, we finally got to marking and our waiting bus.

Tonight we are spending the night in Worzburg. We enjoyed a group dinner and are now winding down for the evening. Tomorrow night will be our last night in Germany :( Half of our ND/MN group will be heading back home while the other half of us will be headed on to Italy for another 5 days. Whew.....today is the half way point and I feel like I just got here!

Good night all!