Heidelberg

Heidelberg was genuinely one of my favorite places.  We had an AirBnB right in the downtown.  We parked our van in an impossibly small parking garage and for two days we happily traipsed around on foot.  Everything was super close that we wanted to see.  It was also a very nice AirBnB unlike the one in Munich. 

 

Heidelberg has quite the history too, but to me a little less fascinating than the others.  Some notable things are that the oldest European man (not Neanderthal) was found here.  The castle was founded in 1100s.  Heidelberg is also the site for the oldest surviving European library.  They are a University town, so there were a lot of different European nations represented.  I heard a lot of Spain Spanish.  There are also a lot of little bookstores and clothing stores like a University town would need.  Dad was telling us that the Catholics and the Lutherans have been "at war" with one another in this city for hundreds of  years.  They literally built a wall through the town and through one of the churches that they both believed to belong to them.   

This little town square was so fun.  It had the Christmas store, several cafes, bookstore, etc... all around.

This was the living room in the AirBnB.  We'd been having a really hard time finding a place to do laundry during our trip.  This place had a washer and dryer that seemed to work fine for the first load... then wouldn't dry after that.  Jer finally figured out that there was a water catcher in it instead of a drain and we didn't know that we were supposed to be empting out the catcher.  Luckily he figured it out in enough time for us to get everything washed and dried.

There were lots of bikes, but some places had signs like this.... no bike parking... of course with bikes in front of it.

This is the city building.