After spending Saturday night, Sunday, and Monday morning in Berlin, then Monday night and Tuesday exploring Dortmund and Soest, and Wednesday morning driving to Pfungstadt, we had exhausted the three places with family connections in Germany that we wanted to visit. We now became out-and-out, no-good, dirty rotten tourists.
Wednesday afternoon we arrived in the city of Ulm, which held two points of interest for us. First up was the Ulm Munster, or Cathedral, which boasts the tallest steeple in the world--over 500 feet tall. And yes, you can climb up it. We arrived in the late afternoon and started up.
Mary was the first to call "Uncle," stopping at the first level--a cool room atop the bells in the steeple with windows set up so you could look down onto the massive bells. "I'll wait for you here," she said, and Sarah, David and I headed up.
We reached a point that seemed pretty high up, and only then noticed the staircase in the middle of the steeple that went even higher. That's where Sarah called it quits; she sat down on the metal that formed the roof of the steeple (or base of the topmost part) and waited for David and I to ascend that last staircase.
When we reached the top, the view was fantastic. I kept worrying about dropping the camera over the side; David was just ecstatic about climbing that high up. We walked around the narrow catwalk (all done in stone, very impressive) and looked out over the Danube, the city, and the plaza below. Then we headed down, collecting Sarah on the way, then found Mary for the descent to the base. When we got all the way down, my calves certainly knew they had had a workout that day. There are 768 stairs, which is to say 1,536 going both directions. I felt them all by the time I was done.
We toured the main body of the Munster itself, and admired the German coats-of-arms along the walls. We looked in vain for the Kleppinger coat of arms, but I realized the chances were slim; we were too far south and east for where our family had been. David and I explored a crypt, which seemed (if my middle German is any good...and it's not...) to hold the remains of some bishops from the Middle Ages; impressive in a church whose record-holding steeple was finished only in the early 19th century.
After the Munster, and a bite of refreshment in a cafe in its north shadow, we discovered a note from the local constablulary on the windshield of the car: we'd parked and failed to pay at the meter, so I got a 5-euro parking ticket. Grrr. We then drove over to the second thing we wanted to see in Ulm: Albert Einstein's birthplace. David, on learning this spring that Einstein was born in Germany, announced he wanted to see it, and so we did. The building itself is gone, but in its place is a whimsical memorial to the genius featuring his famous tongue-sticking-out grin.
That evening we drove to Gunzburg, outside of Legoland Deutschland, and rested for our longest, and most packed, day of the trip: Thursday July 1.
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