Another Fun Summer Vacation Trip

This past week we went to the Strasbourg, France area.  This was our first time being back down there since being back in Germany.  When we were living at Ramstein we had been there 4 or 5 times (with various family as well).  In fact, we took Gregory there when he was less than a month old when my parents visited us.

This time though we ventured out to some of the surrounding areas, as well as letting the boys see some of the fun stuff in Strasbourg.  First we went to a children's museum and this was a ton of fun!  Lots of hands on activities.  Afterwards we went on the boat tour of Strasbourg (on an open top boat) and Gregory thought this was one of the best things ever!  They had an audio tour for kids, so this was very cool to him!  It was amazing to think about 6 years ago we had been there on a closed top boat with my parents.  I have a picture of me holding Gregory and feeding him a bottle while we were on the boat.  What a special memory to get to bring my boys to a favorite place we like to visit.  It's one of a few select locations that we have "artwork" reminding us about, so this was neat for our boys to see it in real life, not just on the wall. 

We also took a day and went to Colmar, France (about an hour away) and visited a toy museum, took a "train" ride around the beautiful city of Colmar, visited a memorial to the military veteran, Audie Murphy and then visited a small bunker near Colmar.  Seeing the memorial was pretty cool as my mother-in-law, Betty, is a big fan of Audie Murphy.  We got some neat pictures and it was neat to see the memorial.  Of course Gregory and Joshua (mostly Gregory) were super excited to learn more about WWII and to hear why Audie Murphy was such a big war hero.  The bunker was used during WWI & WWII and it is one of many bunkers along the Maginot Line.  It was just the start of whetting Tom's appetite to want to see more WWII stuff.  In the evening we even got to enjoy some Domino's Pizza in our hotel which had wonderful air conditioning that was amazing since it was quite hot and humid outdoors.  We are finding that we really like the Holiday Inn Express chain of hotels in Europe :-)

Our last day we went to Cora, which is an incredibly large store like a Target/Walmart, but the awesome thing about Cora is it's in France.  So they sell lots of unique french foods (like Speculoos in a few varieties, macaroons, croissants, etc.).  While we were in there a huge rain storm came through, so we were very thankful that our plans worked out for us to be inside during this time.  After a bite to eat we started our trek home, with a stop along the way.  We stopped at another much larger bunker further north on the Maginot Line.  This location was AMAZING.  There were all kinds of displays and buildings and "static" displays of vehicles (from a small jet, a Russian helicopter, tanks, etc.).  The bunker was also much larger and they had many rooms set up with different things (from a dentist office, a kitchen, an office, etc.)

Unfortunately, we had some detours to avoid staus and it took a bit longer to get home, but maybe, just maybe it was my way of stretching out our vacation time since it was such a fun time for our family to get away and have fun together. 

If you've got the time and want to see some of our pictures, here's the link to where you can see them all.  I don't think I could pick out a favorite this time, so you have to go to the link to see them.  Enjoy!  Click here to see "Our photos".