Not long ago, we visited the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar for a day. As many of you will know, Gibraltar is located at the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea from the Atlantic, along the north shore. To its immediate north is Spain, and across the channel to the south is Morocco, and Africa. Continue reading →
On our first trip to Germany, we paid a visit to Lichtenstein Castle in southern Germany. This privately held Schloss is perched high on a white rock cliff overlooking the Echaz River and the town of Honau in the German state of Baden-Württenberg. We were so impressed with this castle that we came back a second day to get a better look of the buildings with a better sky.
The site where Lichtenstein Castle now sits has a history that goes back as far as the 4th or 5th century, but the most notable period starts around AD 1100 when another castle was located on the site. It was occupied by a group of “Ministerials” of the counts of Achalm, and later the counts of Württemberg.
Ministerials was a term referring to, in this case, knights. They were an interesting class of people in that they were not free people, but were considered to be nobility of sorts. In this case, the knights lived in the castle and were charged with defending the interests of the counts.
Since the counts were not particularly friendly with the folks over in Reutlingen, they were under frequent attack. The castle was destroyed twice, once during the imperial civil war of 1311 and once again at some point between 1377 and 1381. These ruins most likely are still there since they were locate about 500 meters away from the current buildings.
In 1390 the castle was built again, but on the site of the present day castle. This time it was regarded as the best fortified castle of the Middle Ages, and was in use until around 1567 when the then owners abandoned it. In 1802, King Frederick I of Württemberg acquired the property and dismantled the castle to the foundation and built a hunting lodge.
The present day castle was constructed around 1840 by Duke Frederick of Wurttemburg, who was inspired by the book, Lichtenstein, written in 1826 by Wilhelm Hauff, a German Poet.
According to Wikipedia, Lichtenstein in German means “Shining Stone,” but a literal translation according to Google means, “thin stone.” Whatever its true meaning, we thought the castle was worth the time it took to visit.
On the first day we were here, no tours were offered in English, so we took the German language tour. It was of course accompanied with an English written guide, and it was fun to challenge our German skills.
No photography is allowed on the inside of the castle. In many cases,gallery here this is because the property is privately owned, but in this particular case, the most likely reason is because nearly all the walls are covered with original art. And it’s not art hanging on the walls, but the actual walls are painted with artful scenes. After a few million flashes, the paint would no doubt begin to fade prematurely. Whatever the reason, we weren’t able to capture images on our tour of the castle, but you can see their .
We came back a second day just to get some images of the outside grounds because the weather was more cooperative and we had some blue skies for our backdrop.
We were staying in Baden-Baden when we visited Lichtenstein Castle. We mentioned Baden-Baden in an earlier post, along with some pictures here.The drive was about two hours to get from one place to another, but that was part of the reason we were in Germany, to see a bit of the country. Fortunately, there are two ways to get there, so we were able to make a trip there on one road and return on another, making a full day’s loop out of the trip.
One of the things we did before our trip was to go online to Google Maps and make note of all the latitude/longitude coordinates of all the castles and other important places we planned to visit. We’re not sure if the GPS receivers and maps are less reliable in Europe than they are in the states, or if we simply didn’t understand the addressing system. Whatever the reason, it has been handy a few times to have the coordinates along to tell the GPS where we’re trying to go. And of course, we do know how to read maps, but somehow reading a map in German wasn’t nearly as easy as simply punching in a couple of coordinates to the GPS.
We’re not planning to return to Lichtenstein Castle on our upcoming trip to Germany this summer, but it’s only because we plan to be in a different part of the country, and our traveling won’t necessarily take us that far south again in the near future. Still, if we were in the area, it would certainly be on our list of places to see once more.
Visiting Disney and staying on property during a holiday of some kind has become almost a tradition for us. It started with New Years, wanting to be on property so as to not have to deal with New Years Eve drivers. Then it moved to Christmas, and now it seems like pretty much any excuse we have, we’re staying on property having a mini-vacation. This last one was the Fourth of July holiday, and we stayed at one of our favorite moderate hotels, Disney’s Coronado Springs.
Coronado Springs is modeled in the 17th century Spanish style buildings found all over the southwest. If you’re a Californian, you might think it represents Southern California because that’s what much of the southern half of the state looks like.
This hotel, as we understand it, is designed as a place that Disney used for convention business. In fact, it houses a 90,000 square foot convention hall that’s set aside just for that purpose. What this means to most folks is that, unless there’s an actual convention in progress when you’re there, it’s usually pretty quiet. We’ve actually been there when a convention was in town and it was still reasonably quiet compared to some of the other hotels. There’s a new fifteen story addition currently under construction here, projected to be complete some time in 2019, and we think the hotel will still be a quiet, out-of-the-way, lazy little place to relax.
We’ve heard people mention on social media that Coronado Springs is too far away from everything, but we’re not sure what that means. We use Disney transportation when we’re staying on property, and to us, everything is no farther away than the nearest bus stop. In fact, Coronado Springs sits between Hollywood Studios and Animal Kingdom, so it’s actually in between two of the four parks, and still just a bus ride away from the remaining two parks and Disney Springs.
Although not intended as a full review of this hotel, we thought we should at least mention one of our favorite restaurants, Las Ventanas. Another tradition of ours is to seek out the best breakfast on Disney property. There is some good company here in terms of quality, places like The Garden Grill at Epcot and Whispering Canyon Cafe at Disney’s Wilderness Lodge.
Currently, our all-time favorite breakfast is the Whole Wheat Pancakes, although a close second is the Sourdough French Toast or the Huevos Divorciados.
It’s not fair to try to rank the hotels at Disney. For us, we happen to like them all, and our favorite is usually the one we’re staying in at the time. Of course we prefer the Deluxe hotels over the Moderates, and the Moderate hotels are preferred over the Value resorts. But since we’ve stayed in all three “classes” of hotels, we’ve never had a bad time or even a valid complaint. So, we can truthfully say that since we were just there over the Fourth of July, Coronado Springs is our favorite Moderate hotel on Disney Property. Until our next stay.
Below are a few images we made during this recent visit. We did a more complete Photo Tour for MousePlanet.com in 2016, and you can see the images and article here.
One of our favorite pass times when traveling in the American southwest is visiting the various cliff dwelling houses. Places like Mesa Verde come immediately to mind, but the area is scattered with many more out of the way places that can really make an adventure to the southwest something special. Continue reading →
Not long ago, we had the pleasure of taking a British Isles cruise aboard Princess Cruise line’s Caribbean Princess. One of its many stops was the Northern Ireland city of Londonderry, or simply, “Derry,” as it’s called by many of the locals. The plan for our day’s adventure was a tour of the Walls of Derry.
The city as we see it today dates back to the early 1600s’, when the walls were constructed by a consortium of livery companies from London called The Honourable The Irish Society (nope, not a typo here. That’s what it’s called), or more simply, the Irish Society. The purpose of the walls was to protect Scottish and English settlers during what was a turbulent time for northern Ireland. Londonderry actually dates back much further than the construction of the walls, to the 6th century when a monastery was established by St. Columba. He is credited for spreading Christianity throughout much of Ireland and Scotland.
Today, you can walk the city’s wall and get a great overview on much of the rich history this town has to offer. Clearly, in a European city that has been continuously inhabited since the early 7th century, there’s a lot to see and do here.
Our ship docked in Belfast which is about an hour and twenty minutes by bus away from Derry. It took much of the day to see this city because of the travel times, but we were treated with some great views of the countryside of Northern Ireland along the way. Since we had only a day, a walk along the wall and a knowledgeable tour guide was just what we needed.
Here are a few images of our day at the Derry Wall.
In between our many adventures into the Disney Parks and other theme parks around central Florida, we like to spend time looking for wildlife to photograph. As a result, we often go to zoos or other places where we’re likely to see animals up close. Recently, we paid a visit to the Saint Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park. Continue reading →
There are places we enjoy visiting over and over, and one of those places is the great Smoky Mountain National Park in Tennessee. It’s located near the towns of Gatlinburg , Pigeon Forge (home of Dollywood), and the often overlooked Sevierville, Tn. We’ve enjoyed the Smoky Mountains from a 5th wheel trailer, staying in downtown Pigeon Forge. We’ve traipsed back to Cade’s Cove and stayed in our tent, and we’ve stayed in hotels nearby with and without our Harley. Continue reading →
We put together a short video with some more images of the Independence of the Seas that we thought you might enjoy. Check it out below. Watch the sound initially since the beginning of any cruise involves blasting the big horns on the ship, with other ships replying. We posted another article about the Independence of the Seas earlier and you can see it here. There was also an ice show aboard the ship. You can see some of the images from that show here.
