The Sue-Bruggemann's are here!

In the middle of the visit from our grad school friends, my brother and his family also came to Heidelberg for a weekend. They spent 6 or 7 weeks in Europe this summer, based in Amsterdam where my brother has work, but also traveled around quite a bit. We were thrilled that they made it to Heidelberg.

We spent two fun-filled days. On our first day together, we decided to hit some of the major Heidelberg landmarks. Niko, one of Alex's cousins, is a true aficionado of trains, so we started by taking the funicular up the hill. Alex had been cherishing the idea of showing this special Heidelberg train off to his cousin and the boys were really excited to finally experience this together.

It was hot and crowded, so the grown-ups were glad to catch a free seat.

The view at the top, however, was worth the trip!

After enjoying the view and the relative cool at the top of the mountain, we took the funicular back halfway down to visit the castle. The kids enjoyed running around, exploring, and pretending to be knights. At some point, Niko took his mom's camera.

Not wanting to be outdone, Alex asked for mine (which is considerably smaller, lighter, and less sophisticated!). Here's some of what he came up with: A kid's view of the castle:

The evening ended with the aforementioned (see last post) fabulous evening on the banks of the Neckar.

The following day, we had earmarked for a long-anticipated trip to the Technik Museum in Speyer. Some of the most careful readers of this blog might recall a trip to a similar museum we took in the winter. This one, too, featured lots of planes, trains, and automobiles, along with ships, submarines, tanks, etc. In spite of the horrible heat, the boys loved it!

Much to Niko's delight, we started our visit with a huge old locomotive!

Alex was fascinated by this submarine (he's been playing with a small one in the bathtub for a while) and also a one-man submarine, which gave us all the creeps. Alex has been asking about it ever since.

Here my brother is taking them into a larger one displayed outside.

There were also helicopters and if you look closely, you can see Noah (yellow t-shirt) peering out from the top of the stairs.

There were also go-karts and once the boys had gotten over their initial reluctance, they loved them and wanted to ride them over and over. It was fun to see them all get better with every attempt. Here's Alex getting ready to ride...

And here's Noah, cruising down the track!

In one of the hangars, they had a Soviet Space Shuttle (who knew!) and some lunar landing gear. Alex remembered having seen something similar at the Air and Space Museum in December.

The view from the top of the hangar was great. Note the cathedral in the background. The go-kart track was underneath the Lufthansa plane. Needless to say, none of us walked up those steps into the plane to slide down the insanely long and windy slide.

At some point, we took a rest and feasted on our snacks from home.

It was a wonderful, but exhausting day and much kudos goes to my brother who tirelessly took all three boys into all sorts of vehicles in the scorching heat. Thanks, Lukas.

The next morning we only had time for a lovely breakfast and a quick ride on the tram, before they had to depart to catch their plane back to Amsterdam. Thanks so much for coming. We loved having you here!