Week 74: We Stayed Home!

We finally stayed at home for a whole weekend! It was a short week after we got back from Lisbon on Monday, but still super busy for everyone. Friday was my day off and when we were trying to think back on the last time I had a day off that we were in town, it was February! We had planned on doing the wine hike again but unfortunately the weather was cold and rainy. We decide instead to check out another town nearby on the Half-Timber Trail and have lunch.

Kircheim Unter Teck is a town about 30 minutes east of Stuttgart. We walked around and did a little shopping. We noticed that several buildings had silver tape on them and walked around trying to figure out what it was. We finally found a spot in the town where all of the stripes lined up to create a star. We still don’t know why, but it was pretty cool, and it was funny watching other people come and try to stand in the exact spot to get it to line up.

We ended up at a restaurant called Holz & Feuer (Wood & Fire). The pelts on the seats outside is what drew us in but the food also ended up being awesome. I got a pizza (surprise!) and Matt got a schnitzel, which he now says is the best schnitzel he’s had so far thanks to the raspberry jelly it was served with.

Saturday, we planned to go ski shopping at a second-hand ski bazaar in Stuttgart. We got there a little over an hour after it opened and it was pretty well picked-through. No surprise the Germans were on-time/early. We didn’t leave with any new skis and the weather was cold and rainy so we decided to go to the Mercedes Benz Museum, which was right down the street.

The MB Museum is supposedly the best attraction in Stuttgart and everyone who’s been raves about it. We had been waiting for a rainy day to come along to go. For a museum about cars, it was definitely really cool. Ryan and Matt were in heaven and Brooklyn and I stayed interested the whole time. I hadn’t realized before the Daimler and Benz actually invented the car. Not together, but they separately invented their own versions of it about 40 miles away from each other. Years later, the two companies eventually merged. The museum took us through the whole history of the car and named several key events in the development of the car that all happened within about 30 miles of where we live, which was really cool.

We ended up in the museum for about four hours and we definitely didn’t cover everything. Of course, while we were inside, we were shocked at how the weather quickly turned into a gorgeous, sunny day. At least we all enjoyed ourselves.

After the Museum, we headed out to Weil der Stadt, a town about 20 miles west of Stuttgart to meet some friends for dinner at Gasthaus Traube. It was traditional German food, which they had said was really good and they were right. Matt always finishes his plate, but the rest of the family usually picks around at German food. This time, we all finished and agreed it was awesome.

After our Saturday running around town, we planned on laying low Sunday. This was until I remembered that this weekend was the Krautfest (Cabbage Festival) in Filderstadt. The kids of course were not interested so Matt and I drove over and spent the next couple hours wandering through the cabbage displays, games, and food stalls. It did not smell as bad as I thought it would and I even had a pork sandwich with sauerkraut that was pretty good. I guess you just need to eat sauerkraut really fresh to like it. The highlights were the sauerkraut making contest, cabbage decorating, and cabbage bands.

One other big highlight of the day was that we removed all of the ice from our freezers. No, this isn’t a joke. We have two freezers in our house and neither one seals very well so months and months of ice has built up and since they are already small, we had lost about 50% of our useful space. We finally had time to empty both and thaw the ice. Since we had so much space, we finished off the weekend by going to the commissary and doing a huge, American-sized shop to fill the freezers!