Castlin'

This past weekend Martin surprised me with a trip up the Rhine to see all the castles that sit along the river. The trip included a 5-course candlelit dinner in a castle and a night in a castle so I was pretty excited.

There are a lot of castles along the Rhine river in the stretch between Bingen and Bonn - over 40. It's a really nice drive or bike ride or boat ride to travel some or all of that stretch and see them all. With only a few exceptions, all the castles were built between the 12th and 14th centuries. For our trip, we stayed in the lower half (between Bingen and Koblenz) and we started our tour with the Rheinfels castle which is on the west bank of the Rhine.

The Rheinfels castle is mostly a ruin but you are given a self-tour pamphlet and you can walk around and see where all the parts of the castle used to be and there's a nice museum you can spend time in as well. There are also mine tunnels underneath the castle that you can wander around in - make sure you have an iphone light or flashlight because they're pitch black and the floors and ceilings are uneven.

Here's a picture of the castle from the other side of the Rhine. The only way to get a decent picture of these castles is to take one from the other side of the river and with a camera with a good zoom. This was the best I got.



Pictures from "inside" the castle:



Martin in the mine tunnels:



The view looking north:



Here's one of the other castles along the Rhine. We saw almost 20 castles while we were driving up and down the Rhine and in the hills surrounding it. It was really neat. I need to get back to this area and just take pictures of all the castles we saw (so, actually stop the car and take the pictures instead of just looking at the castles as we drive by).



Our next step was the Marksburg castle, which is the only castle that has never been destroyed. The only way to see the inside of this castle is with a guided tour, fyi. Below is the best picture I got of the Marksburg. The day became cloudy in the afternoon and the light just wouldn't cooperate but this castle is a beautiful white castle and it's really impressive to see it from a distance, especially if you can see it from the other side of the Rhine.



Some pics from inside the castle:



Looking out at the Rhine from the castle:



Next we headed to our hotel for the night, Burg Liebenstein. It claims to be the highest castle in the middle Rhine valley. The hotel rooms are in the gray tower in the pictures below.



Martin barely fit in our room:



And the door to our room was not only in the middle of a stairway, it also had the bottom of another stairway right in front of the door so you'd walk into it if you weren't careful. It sure was fun. And yes that stairway leading down from our room was very steep and narrow.



Here's Martin playing with some toys. All the souvernir shops had such fun things for kids! Wooden swords and shields, crossbows, axes, little foam maces.



And here are some pictures from our 5-course candlelit medieval dinner. They served "medieval" food, which meant we got a platter filled with meat, potatoes, and veg. It was neat.



This is the castle next door to Castle Liebenstein, Castle Sterrenberg. This was actually the view out of the windows in our room. These two castles were built closer together than any other castles along the Rhine. There's some story about a king building both to please his feuding descendants but I'm not completely sure if that's correct or not. Maybe only the king who built it knows.



Taking the ferry across the Rhine to get home! I had to sit in the car because it made me dizzy trying to take pictures with the fast-moving current around us and the boat twirling around. Martin found this amusing.

Dad's Honorary Doctorate

My dad is now "Dr Meyer", in an honorary sort of way. He received an honorary doctorate of science from Mount Saint Mary College this past weekend, in recognition of everything that he has done for the college and for the community as a whole. Martin and I flew out for the weekend to help him celebrate, and several other family members also attended. Below are some pictures from before and during the ceremony and the luncheon afterwards.

Leaving the house in the morning:



The pretty flowers on the stage.



Processing to the stage



Hanging out on stage. The woman in yellow is the president of the college. I really liked her. Everybody I met from the college was great.



Part of our cheering section. My aunt Chris and uncle Art were also there.



Receiving his degree.



A few luncheon pics.



The blurb about my dad. It's a long list, and it's not even complete!



We topped off the weekend with a full extended family gathering on Sunday at my dad's house to celebrate his achievement. Unfortunately I didn't take many pictures that day since we had a professional photographer present, and the ones I did take were mostly of all the kids running through the sprinklers which aren't exactly blog material.

The Maldives

To finish off our vacation, we spent three days on Paradise Island in the Maldives. It was amazing. Below are some pictures from our time on the island.

First off, when you step out of the airport you are on a dock! Where you're picked up by a boat that takes you to your resort. This is our boat coming in. Just seeing the color of this water when you get off the plane is such a wonderful feeling.



Our hotel pool. It was really small, but most people spend their time on the beach anyway.



The main hotel bar, where we enjoyed evening cocktails before dinner and also the occasional espresso.



Some pictures taken while walking around the island. It took about 30 minutes to walk from one end to the other, in the sand, and about 3 minutes to walk the short way across the island. So it was really narrow but pretty long. It had 220 beach bungalows and maybe 50 water villas so it could hold a lot of people but the beaches were almost always completely deserted. Sorry if the pictures below are repetitive, I never get tired of seeing the colors of the water.



Our lounge chairs. Every room has their own lounge chairs on the beach, which was nice.



We ate lunch at a restaurant all the way at the end of the water villas a few times. This was the view from there.



There are many excursions that you can take from the island. One evening Martin went night fishing and caught three fish. One of the restaurants (the Italian one) cooked them for us and we had a little feast of the fish, some grilled vegetables, and pasta with pesto.



Post-sunset picture, taken from Martin's night fishing boat:



Every day, several things happen on the island. At 6:30pm, the sharks are fed. They are all relatively small sharks, but you see them in the ocean throughout the day so it's nice to know that they're well-fed. Thankfully, if they bite you, they don't do too much damage, but it's still not pleasant. We saw one woman with a shark bite but she didn't even need stitches.



They also shine a light on the beach in the evenings to attract the stingrays, then they feed them.



We went on a snorkeling excursion and the picture below is the reef we snorkeled at. This was the best snorkeling I've ever done - we saw so many different and colorful fish. And, on the way back, our boat stopped and hung out with about 8 dolphins that we found. Sorry we don't have any pictures other than the reef in the middle of the ocean - you'll have to go there yourself and see the fish and dolphins firsthand.