This time I will write in English so that some of our friends can also follow the story.
I attended a work-related training course this past summer in Kronberg, near Frankfurt in Germany. When I was planning how I would deal with the practical issues like travel and lodging, we decided with my family to try to find a way to combine it together with some vacation time as well. So, we ended up spending a total of two weeks in Germany, which meant one week of vacation for me and two weeks for my wife and kids.
After some months of juggling with potential places to stay we decided to have roughly this kind of route (see a map at the end of this post):
- Frakfurt airport
- Nentershausen
- Usingen (I was at Kronberg daytime during the course)
- Luxemburg
- Neumuhle
- Frakfurt airport
A happy surprise was the cheap flights: a return flight HEL-FRA-HEL was only 90€ per person with Lufthansa, including full meal onboard!
Part of my interest to the trip was of course photography. I took with me my trusted ThinkTank Airport Antidote that contained Canon 5D, EF 17-40 f4 and EF 70-200 2.8 IS. Because of work I also had my company-provided laptop that I also used to offload images from memory card every now and then.
Pre-course
We arrived to Frankfurt Wednesday afternoon. After arrival we headed directly AVIS desk to get a car. I had reserved a VW Passat class car, but when we got to the desk the clerk suggested a Skoda Roomster. It was about 100€ cheaper for the two weeks than a Passat and I thought why not save a few euros. Afterwards I wished I would have chosen Passat: Roomster was equipped with a 1.4 liter engine (not very good for autobahns) and there could have been more room for the luggage too. But we survived, I could accelerate to 160-165 km/h quite easily and all of the luggage fit after all ;)
First place to stay was for four nights at a small town called Nentershausen. Our host was F.-W. von Baumbach, nice gentleman from an old family of Baumbachs. www.von-baumbach.de is the link to his farmhouse Gutshof. By the way, this place was the only one which accepted credit cards!
Mr Baumbach even took part in the HessenTour 2008 inline skating tour when we were there. Here he is getting ready for the skating action:
There was a nice old building at the Gutshof that contained a few rooms dedicated to different kinds of games:
Near the Gutshof was also a local old castle, Burg Tannenberg http://www.tannenburg.de/
During the course
From Nentershausen we drove to Usingen, where was our next place to stay for the duration of my training course. Dr Brigitte Kubota-Mueller hosted us in her large house. We were lucky to be the only ones staying there, so we had a lot of room just for us. I drove each day from Usingen to Kronberg (about 25km one way), where the company has an office. About 20 employees from different parts of Europe took part in the course at a fairly new and shiny office:
During that week, the rest of the family made many smaller trips to nearby villages.
Post-course
Right after the course ended, we headed to Luxemburg to visit some friends. They live quite near the center of Luxemburg, but still they have cows wandering around on the backyard:
From Luxemburg we moved on to the last place, which was in Neumuhle (www.ferienhof-neumuehle.de), only 50-60km from Luxemburg. It was a very nice farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, even the cell phone coverage dropped to 0 :)
Epilogue and image gallery
Overall, we had a very successful vacation/work trip. When I was searching for some travel guides before the trip it was very hard to find anything for Germany. There were lots of books for Spain, Italy and France for example. I guess Germany is not considered as a top vacation destination, but I have to say that Germany has a lot to offer! It is very underrated as a vacation destination in my opinion and offers a lot also for kids.
Here is the map of all the locations we visited. Altogether we drove about 2000 km during that two-week period and I took several hundreds of pictures. You can see the gallery of the best ones here.
A few more highlights:
