Not having internet access in Germany (at least on a regular basis – which means at night, after my wife falls asleep) has done some damage to my narrative of our trip. I had been writing some material into my journal using iBook Author, but the entries there are pretty jumpy as well.

So now the whole thing is out of joint. What to do?

I’m going to just post my last full day’s entry here and then another post with some comments on the trip and call it good. Then it’s back to DHS and codecademy and life here in the hot, desolate midwest.

Here’s what I have:

Second Day in Wuerzberg
We decided to take about half the day today walking around the city and the rest as a break from tourism for some quiet time in or near the hotel. We think that there is a park not too far from here and are wondering if we might find a playground where Harry can exhaust himself.
A note about the hotel: We’re staying at the Novatel hotel in the AltStadt. We are nearby a school, so there was some noise of children playing in the morning, but that’s not the bad sort of noise that disturbs sleep. We did not know what to expect with respect to our breakfast this morning because we couldn’t remember if this hotel included it or not. In fact it did and it was probably one of the best breakfasts we’ve had since arriving.
On our walk today we visited two churches, Stift Haug and the Church of St. Mary Although beautiful on the outside, neither was especially remarkable inside (perhaps due to reconstruction after the war). Stift Haug was very obsessed with the crucifixion, depicting it in many ways. As you come into the church, you are immediately met with a modern sculpture of it and all throughout the church were paintings following the stations of the cross. In addition to these paintings, others depicted the deaths of the saints. None of these was very sparing of the pain and suffering associated with these events and, more notably, there was little mention of anything else (such as any good deeds or rising after death). I wonder how being faced with these images affects the mind of the people growing up in these churches.
The second was a gothic church in the center of town that was largely an interesting red color on the outside, but much more classical on the inside. One thing to note though was that this church was apparently the resting place of many old Franconian knights.
We got as far as the bridge, but even after seeing the fort across the river, Harry was not interested in hiking up the hill to visit it. So, there we turned around and made back to the hotel. We only stopped briefly to pick up some food from a grocer, where I made a dismal impression as I got to the front of a long line only to find that they did not take Visa and could not figure out how to cancel the transaction without stopping all three lines and talking very loudly about the stupid American. Ugh. I didn’t enjoy that.

Here’s a photo of the fort from the bridge near the town square. (We had a great hike up and wander around this fort the next day.)