Tulip Season in Holland: Amsterdam, Zaanse Schans, Voldendam and the Keukenhof gardens

Next on the blogging agenda is our trip to Holland for tulip season! Spring time is the peak of tourism for the Netherlands because of their world famous tulip fields and gardens. If you've scrolled through the travel boards of Pinterest, you've probably stumbled across at least one beautiful picture of a big wooden windmill surrounded by colorful fields striped with tulips as far as the eye can see. Of course, we had to be one of the millions worldwide who venture to Holland from mid-March to mid-May to check out the Keukenhof tulip gardens. We had a lot of fun, but I will say that it was a good reminder that when you're traveling, sometimes you have to accept that expectations do not equal reality.

Day Trip: Cochem and Reichsburg, Germany

In the past few weeks, it finally getting sunny and warm outside! This glimpse of spring time sadly did not last long before it started raining every single day. Of course, in a month it will be burning hot and neither our house nor work have air conditioning, so we have to enjoy the weather before it turns miserable again. Several weekends ago, we drove to Cochem with some friends of ours to get out of the house and explore somewhere new.

Bad Blogger

It's true, I've been pretty horrible at updating recently. Within the next week, I hope to finish 3 posts that I'm drafting about our recent adventures. I swear I didn't completely give up blogging, but we've just been extremely busy!

As a sneak peak of what is to come, here is a picture of a giant pig made out of flowers.

Does it creep you out? If not, it probably should. That thing is terrifying.

Day Trip: Idstein Spring Festival

For the past two weeks, it's been unusually sunny, warm and beautiful here. This weekend, on the other hand, was the exact opposite. On Saturday, we got caught in the middle of a hail storm, something I have never witnessed outside of Colorado. When I say "hail storm", I don't mean the typical strong thunderstorm with accompanying hail that was more common in the southeast, I mean that it went from being sunny and calm to 30 mph wind gusts with pea sized hail stones (no rain) within 5 minutes. We just so happened to be leaving the store with a car load of groceries when it started. I always assumed the reasoning for the hail storms in Colorado was due to the high altitude and inability for the hail to melt into rain before hitting the ground, but that wouldn't explain why it suddenly hailed here. Welcome to springtime in Germany, I guess. It was obviously the best weekend possible to take a trip to a Spring festival a few towns away.

Local: Fasching (or Fasnacht Day) 2014

I remember when I was very young living in Pennsylvania and "celebrating" Fasnacht Day. For my non-German-American readers, Fasnacht Day is better known as Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, Carnival or, more simply put, the day before Lent begins. A fasnacht is like the German equivalent of a King's Cake, for lack of better comparison. It's a huge, fatty doughnut possibly made out of potatos. As a kid, I don't remember doing anything for Fasnacht Day other than acknowledging it. I'm not sure if I've ever actually had a fasnacht, but I would probably take a whoppie pie from an Amish bakery before a fasnacht anyway.

A few months ago, we were over at our friend's house flipping through a catalog about happenings in our area when I saw an advertisement for a Fasching cruise. I immediately asked if Fasching was the same as Fasnacht Day, and no one seemed to know what I was even talking about. Turns out, Fasching is basically the German Carnival and Faschnut Day is, of course, still the Tuesday before Lent right in the middle of the Fasching celebration.

Fasching is basically a giant, week long party here in Germany. Most of it involves dressing up in costumes (like Halloween), parades, heavy drinking and breaking glass all over the streets. Occasionally, you'll also see young men trying to persuade women to kiss them, but mostly it's just drunken craziness in costumes. Yet somehow, it's also relatively family friendly.