Extreme European Adventure: Ludwigsburg & Stuttgart (June 18, 2014)

Wednesday, June 18, 2014
After a quick breakfast of museli, we set out for Ludwigsburg for the day. Our objective was simply to explore old town Ludwigsburg and enjoy the Ludwigsburg Palace (Residenzschloss) and gardens.

Ludwigsburg is a simple 15 minute train ride from Stuttgart, so Stuttgart really did make a great home base.

On our walk to the palace, we ran into the local town farmer's market. It was nice to take an absorbive look around. They had some gorgeous fresh strawberries for sale.

We made it to the Residenzschloss without too much fanfare and purchased admission into the gardens at 8 Euro per adult. We opted not to do the interior tour, although I hear it is amazing. They have an English tour at 1:30pm every day at the palace, but we were honestly too taken by the expansive gardens and gorgeous weather to spend an hour and a half inside. I really do hear it is worth it. I could see how you could easily spend a day exploring the gardens and another exploring the interior.

German postcard at ticketing booth - anyone know the translation?.

The Residenzschloss is Germany's largest Baroque castle, and the gardens and grounds are over 30 hectares in size. It is too hard to describe what might have been the most impressive garden grounds I've ever seen. Kris was beyond delighted - in his Kris way.

They have a fairytale garden as well with children's rides and animatronics/booths set up to retell some classic fairytales. I could tell by looking what some of the fairytales were (Hansel and Gretel, Sleeping Beauty, and Pinocchio), but I largely was lost. Almost everyone knows and speaks English here, but little is written or translated.

Luckily you don't really need to translate the gorgeous smells of florals. No fake or mutated plants here...just nature at it's finest cultivation.

Skilter!

We managed to find time to take a nap under a sprawling shade tree. (Well, I took a nap...Kris didn't like the bugs so he wandered more - and took photos of me napping.)

There were some cute animals too (mostly birds).

This guy is the Joey Tribbiani of birds.

Flamingo fight

 Bird bath

Did I mention this place was massive?

After leaving the gardens, we went into town to see if the market was still on. It wasn't, but we did stop for a piece of yummy kuchen (cake) before heading back to Stuttgart to go to the Killesbergturm Tower.

Snake sculpture - Ludwigsburg

The Killesbergturm Tower is in the midst of a large urban park and located at the highest point of the park. It was imposing and neat and afforded excellent views of Stuttgart.

Tired from the many hours of pounding the pavement, we headed back to the AirBnB. Kris made us another yummy dinner, and I edited some photos before calling it a night.


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Extreme European Adventure: Stuttgart, Germany (June 17, 2014)

Tuesday, June 17, 2014
We started today by missing our alarm, and I awoke with a massive migraine. I quickly downed Excedrin Migraine with a warm Diet Coke and laid back down while Kris got ready for the day. Luckily, the caffeine, meds, and nap kicked my headache down into manageable land. We headed to the Frankfurt main station to get train reservations into Stuttgart and our sleeper train reservation from Budapest to Berlin.

We had to go to the DB Station for the reservations and click the kiosk screen to retrieve a number to wait in queue to talk to someone since our chip and signature cards don't work in the Germany rail kiosks. Sad - but the wait wasn't long and the system seems efficient. Blasted American credit cards. I can't wait until we fully have the chip and pin system.

To save money, we got the Quer-Durchs-Land-Ticket so we could travel anywhere in Germany on slow trains for the entire day. We took Regional trains from Frankfurt - Heidelberg and from Heidelberg - Stuttgart. It wasn't the fastest way to get to Stuttgart, but it saved us money. The scenery was quite nice too.

When we got to Stuttgart, we took the underground local train to the Bibliotek stop to find our AirBnB. Ingrid, the host, was super easy to communicate with and was ready to greet us upon our arrival. Our apartment was the top floor apartment of Ingrid's building and well set up to accommodate guests for a while. It had a spacious room with dining area and nice kitchen with all of the cooking utensils you could need. The bathroom was nice too and had shower and tub. We had a very pleasant stay in Stuttgart.

Our Stuttgart AirBnB

After checking in, we went out to explore the town despite the rain. We didn't have anything in particular in mind to do. We really just went out to explore the pedestrian area of Stuttgart (Konigstrasse) and Palace Square (Schlossplatz). We also stopped at a Rewe grocery store to buy stuff to make dinner and our caffeine provisions.

We didn't just have to watch out for the rain though...Stuttgart had these trees with raining death balls.

Kris, ever the lover of local flavor, didn't pay very close attention whenever he bought what he thought was a local soda. Turns out it was a non-alcoholic beer. He's picked a winner two days in a row now...green sauce and non-alcoholic beer!  Makes me laugh so darn hard!

At least the dinner he made was really rather tasty!

We found this dehydrated yogurt in one of the cabinets.  Odd...to each their own I suppose?

Dehydrated yogurt found in Stuttgart AirBnB - doesn't look tasty like dinner.

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