Christmas 2002

We wanted to spend Christmas this year somewhere in Europe. Since we already got a taste of Christmas in Sweden during the month of December, we decided to travel to Germany and Austria for the holidays. I had enough vacation time to take over 2 weeks, so it was a nice long trip.

In the pages ahead we've written a day-by-day description of the trip along with lots of pictures. You can click on any of the pictures to see a larger version. But first, a quick overview of the trip.

We began on Thursday, December 19. We left Linköping on our way to Frankfurt, Germany. It was a full day of traveling -- we left before 7:00 AM and arrived after 9:00 PM. But despite some train difficulties, the trip went reasonably well. We spent the next couple of days in Frankfurt. It's not the nicest city we've been in, but they had a huge Christmas Market -- lots of booths spread throughout the main shopping area of the city selling all sorts of things.

On Sunday, December 22, we left for Rothenburg, a picturesque walled city. It rained quite a bit while we were there, but apart from that we really enjoyed it. There was quite a bit to see, and it was fun to be in an old medieval looking town.

On Christmas Eve we moved on to Rüdesheim. Our hotel was in the hills above this small town, which is right along the Rhine River. There wasn't much to see in the town, since most places were closed for the holidays and the weather still wasn't cooperating with us. But we went walking anyway and spent time just relaxing. We had 3 and 4 course dinners for the three evenings we were there, and they were delicious. Christmas was a bit different than usual, but it was nice.

The next couple days didn't go quite as smoothly as we had planned. On Friday, December 27, we traveled on to Cologne. Our hotel was further away from the main part of town than we had hoped, so a good part of our day was spent walking back and forth. We got to see the huge Cologne cathedral, which was nice (though not somewhere I would want to attend church regularly).

We tried to see a couple other things too, but weren't very successful.

We only had one day in Cologne, and then on Saturday we went back to the Rhine to see Rheinfels castle in St Goar. The castle was pretty interesting, but that was about all there was to see in St Goar. We had planned on staying a couple more hours, but we decided to catch the next train and spend some unplanned time in Mainz instead. There wasn't much to see there either, but it was enough to keep us occupied until our train left for Munich.

Unfortunately, our hotel in Munich was quite a ways away from the main part of town -- too far to walk. And our full day there was on a Sunday so there wasn't much open anyway. We did some walking, but didn't get to see too much. On Monday we did laundry, saw a bit of the city, had lunch, and then left for Salzburg, Austria, where we spent New Years.

It was a much different holiday season than we are used to, and we are looking forward to spending next Christmas with friends and family again. But it was nice to see more of Europe, and it was a great vacation.

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