Pretty Views Everywhere!

The day started out with picking up the rental car. It was a Citroen c4, which is a French made car. It somewhat resembled a minivan, but a little more compact and way cooler! It was futuristic looking... the mirrors closed automatically when the car shut down and the windshield was the size of a bus I think. It definitely treated us well though!

First stop with the car was across the Rhine River in the area of Koenigswinter. The Grandhotel was first since we actually had directions there. It is atop one of the bigger hills and gives a great view of the river and the surrounding countryside. You could even see the Bad Godesburg Castle, as well as the Drachenburg Castle, and Ruins Castle (which would be our next stops). We walked around for a bit and took as many pictures as we could and decided it was time to find the Drachenburg Castle.

This was going to be a bit of a challenge since we didn't have directions, just a general area. We came across a parking lot with some cars that would park and start walking up a hill so we decided to give it a shot. We were sadly disappointed to see that all these people were just going to a pool. But, fortunately a guy overheard us talking and told us we just needed to keep walking up the hill. So that we did and about 15 minutes later arrived at this huge castle. Even though this isn't a very old castle, it was still beautiful and gave us more great views of the city of Bonn. We explored the grounds for a little over an hour. We even went to the castles turret, which is the top of the castle that was used to keep a look out for enemies. It was about 138 stairs to the top, which is nothing compared to what were gonna do in a few days! There were once again great views, we could even see Cologne in the distance which is a 30 minute drive away.

It was now time to make the hike to the top of the hill to see the Ruins Castle. Debbie and Michelle decided they would walk back to the car and wait for us while we walked to the top. It wasn't a very long distance to the top, but it went straight up! It was definitely hard, especially considering I did not have good shoes on. It was completely worth it though because even though this castle was mostly destroyed, it was built in 1147. How many people can say they have touched something that old? Once we saw all we could see, we decided to make the walk back down. But it really wasn't much of a walk... since the hills were so steep, we basically had to run down. This just meant the pain wouldn't last as long, haha!

From here we began our planned trip to Amsterdam. The estimated drive time was around 3 hours. We had planned to drive to Amsterdam, explore and stay the night and head towards Meppen, Germany Wednesday morning. Oh how plans change so quickly... stay tuned!