This morning started off with a drive straight up the winding road leading to the monasteries of Meteora. At their peak, there were 24 monasteries. Today, there are only 6 remaining. Most of them require a hike up 142 to over 300 stairs to reach the monastery. We chose one that was open and only…

A very short post today as we spent almost all day traveling from Rethymno, Crete to Kalabaka on mainland Greece. The morning started with a great deal of haze that never went away. Sand and hot wind from the Sahara have blown north, as far as Switzerland. This has caused a yellow/orange haze to hang…

Day 4 was a day in the countryside. We started off at the Arkadi Monastery. This Monastery was a key point in the uprising against the Turks in the 1800’s. Today it is mostly rebuilt and a very easy place to visit. Next we headed to the Melidoni Cave, site of a massacre during the…

A couple of things I missed from yesterday. Crete has 50 olive trees for every person living here. Each person uses 25-30 liters of olive oil per year. Most families own and harvest their own olive trees to provide them with olive oil for the whole year. Today, we started off the day with a…

As the first day was mostly traveling to our first lodging in Greece, I am combining the first two days of the trip together. The first day was mostly traveling. We flew from JFK to Athens then Athens to Crete. I did catch my first glimpse of Greece as we were descending towards Athens. Once…

Sadly, the last day of Christmas Markets. We took today pretty easy as the only thing we had on the agenda was to see the markets. We got to the first market just after it opened at 11AM. The medieval market is quite a bit smaller than the one in Esslingen but still a nice…

Not many photos today as this was another transition day. We left Nuremberg this morning and got to Munich before noon. After leaving the car we headed off for a quick lunch before hitting the Deutsches Museum, a science and technology museum. I don’t usually find museums the most photogenic but I do have a…

I can’t believe it’s already day six! This was the first day we did not have to drive anywhere before we could start wandering around a location. We started the day just exploring Nuremberg itself. We eventually made our way to the Nuremberg Castle. We eventually made the Christmas Market. With it being a Saturday…

Sadly, left Tubingen to head off to Nuremberg today. On the way, we made a stop in the town of Rothenburg. When looking at it originally, it looked like a neat medieval village with a walkable city wall to check out. We did not know that it also has its own Christmas Market but found…

Stuttgart is the largest market we have been to and the largest market on the trip so far. We got very lucky with parking and only had a three minute walk, at most, to get to the edge of the market. As we had arrived at around 11:30AM the market was not overly crowded which…