Heidelberg and Plitvice

Yep, back to boring titles for now...sorry to disappoint!

With a couple of extra days we decided to spend some time in western Germany, in Heidelberg. We stayed in a hostel in the old city, which was beautiful. We actually took a day trip our first day there to Freiberg where we took a cable car through parts of the Black Forest. In reality, it’s just a forest, but it was pretty neat. We had the cable car to ourselves, and the change in the view as we rose in elevation was great. We began the trip with green trees at the bottom, fall colors soon dominating, until finally little patches of snow became a blanket of white everywhere. We enjoyed a brief walk at the top before sipping hot chocolate with rum at the restaurant.

Our second day in Heidelberg was spent at the Heidelberg castle. The castle itself was okay...the best part is the lovely location. On the castle grounds they had a museum about the history of pharmacy. If anyone can shed some light on that, I’d be interested.

An afternoon train took us to Munich where we boarded an overnight train to Zagreb, Croatia. We stored our luggage at the train station in Zagreb, picked up some maps at tourist information, and then did a short-ish walking tour through the city. Croatia is not yet a part of the EU, so they use a different currency, which is always inconvenient. It can be expensive to exchange money, so when we’re not using the euro, we have to try and calculate exactly how much we’ll need so that we come out as close to exact as possible.

Anyway, Zagreb was a nice city, but we were really anxious to get to Plitvice, where we planned to spend 3 nights near the National Park, spending one day in the park and the other doing as little as possible. We are so busy every day, we both felt like this would be a good time to relax and stay in, taking a break from being tourists.

The Plitvice Lakes were beautiful. There are 16 lakes in the park, and dozens and dozens of waterfalls. It’s amazing! We explored the park for the day, loving the lack of tourists at this time of year. There were only a few other people, which made for a quiet day! Marija, who runs the guesthouse we’re staying in, drove us to the park and picked us up again...she’s incredible!

We’re currently enjoying our day off, being as lazy as possible! Not much more to say at the moment. We head to Slovenia next...

Pics:

1-6. These are pictures of Plitvice Lakes. Number 6 is Cassie's fault...she started the whole hanging over rails thing and now Rebecca does it too and makes me nervous!

7-8. These are a couple of pictures of Zagreb.

9. This is a view of Heidelberg Castle. It's under renovation, which is the reason for the ugly scaffolding on the right. Other than that, it's beautiful!

10. This view is looking down on the city of Heidelberg, from the castle!

11-13. These photos are of the Black Forest. They show the various climate changes we experienced on our way up!!!

By the way, these pictures loaded backwards this time. It's different every time, which is why I gave up trying to make any sense out of it and just put the pictures up in one post and their explanation up in another post. Hopefully it's not too confusing for everyone!