5 Wonderful Years of Marriage

On January 4, 2009, we celebrated our 5-year anniversary. We have had a wonderful five years of marriage. We have gone through so much together. Marisa finished her bachelors, Collin got a job in Fort Worth after grad school, we bought our first house, we got a dog, we experienced giving away our dog several times and have missed her ever since, we have moved overseas to Germany, and are now expecting our first child just to name a few big events.

Germany is well known for castles and cuckoo clocks. So, what better way to spend a milestone anniversary than in a castle. We celebrated the weekend at a castle hotel in Hornberg, Germany. We got lost on our way and drove up a mountain on an unpaved icy road. We have a GPS but I (Marisa) put in the wrong Hornberg address. Luckily, we saw a few people outside on top of the mountain and Collin was able to communicate in German to find out where the schloss (castle) was and if we were in Hornberg. They told us we were in Hornberg but that there was no castle there. They said the Hornberg we were looking for was around 90 kil. away, which was about an hour and a half. I took the GPS down from our windshield and put in the zip code for the city we were going to and sure enough another Hornberg showed up. The estimated time of arrival was about 1.5 hours. We checked into our castle around 4 pm. The sun was setting and it was beautiful outside. Our room overlooked the city. We got dressed for dinner and went downstairs to the dining room, yes, we got to eat dinner at a castle too! The dinner was delicious. There was live music and we had a table with a view by a window. We had a wonderful time.

Our castle hotel

dinner at the castle

My pregnant belly

view from our room

breakfast at the castle

views from the castle

The roads were icy and it had snowed that weekend. Originally we were hoping to hike Germany's largest waterfall but the weather conditions made it unsafe, especially for a pregnant woman to hike a mountain in the ice and snow. Instead we decided to drive to Triberg, Germany, and see the world's largest cuckoo clock. We got to see the hour change and the cuckoo bird sing outside and paid 3 EUR to go inside the museum. Thankfully, we were the only people in the museum. Not that it was not a good museum, it is just not a touristy season right now. We saw how the largest cuckoo clock worked and read a little history about the cuckoo clock. We also saw more cuckoo clocks than we have ever seen in our life in the museum's shop. We did not buy a cuckoo clock. Many people have told us that when you move to Germany you leave with either a baby or a cuckoo clock. We plan on leaving with our baby and maybe, if the price is right, we will consider a cuckoo clock as well.

World's largest cuckoo clock