After making our way back down the Rhine, we arrived fairly late in Karlsruhe and spent the morning sleeping in. Once we awoke, we decided to pop over to Strasbourg, France for lunch. It's pretty cool to be able to hop in the car and be in a different country in under an hour; and what's more amazing is the change in culture that happens in such a short distance.

As usual, the cathedral is the center of town. Strasbourg Cathedral is very impressive gothic cathedral, full of intricate detail in both the interior and exterior. One of the highlights for me was the astronomical clock, complete with automata and clockwork mechanisms for tracking the position of the sun and moon. It even indicates equinoxes and leap years. It's a truly wonderful piece of machinery.

The cathedral also has a beautiful organ, however while the red and gold case is from the 14th and 15th century the mechanism is from the 1980s.

I was getting a bit sick of cathedral and castle photos, so as Strasbourg is an area fairly busy with photos I decided to turn my camera on the people in the mains square. I'm really glad I did - the photo above is one of my favorites from the trip. The graffiti between the two men translates to "work, consume, borrow, die."

I also think this lady should perhaps have stood somewhere else…

After touristing for a while we found a non-pretentious and non-touristy French cafe to have lunch in. We ordered sandwiches, and of course they came out on baguettes and were absolutely fantastic.

We went he long way home, through the Black Forest and up and down the mountain. Most of the time was spent enjoying the view from the car, so not that many photos were taken. It was an amazing trip, reaching about 1km above sea level, and winding our way up and down a few peaks. It's summer, so the weather was mostly fine and the road was full of motorcyclists. I certainly can't blame their enthusiasm -- I'd love to take the Mustang for a trip up and down the winding roads.

The drive down the Rhine was amazing, despite being a little rainy at first. The highlight of the trip for me was stopping at Burg Rheinfels, a medieval castle in St. Goar.

While part of the castle is currently used as a hotel and restaurant, there's a significant part of the castle that is left alone for you to explore. Thin rickety stairs that are as steep as ladders, dark tunnels that formed part of the castle's defense, and a huge wine storage cellar… so much fun to explore!

Despite being left alone to follow one of two routes around the castle, we still learnt a bit of it's history. The most curious part for me was learning about the German robber barons who leveraged the geographic advantage their castles provided to collect tolls from passing merchant vessels. Burg Rheinfels was one of two castles, one on each side of the Rhine, set up to collect these tolls. The fortifications of the castle were even expanded after cannons were invented and the ships could start to fight back!

After climbing all the way to the top of the castle we were rewarded with a breathtaking view of the river. Definitely worth the effort.

After a small sleep-in and a hangover-curing breakast in Erlangen we got in the Mercedes for the trip to Bonn. My brother's girlfriend is from Bonn, and this was the long-awaited trip to meet her family. After we arrived her father kindly gave us a tour around town, including a visit to the Sterntor or "star gate" pictured above.

It was a fantastic night spent in Bonn, with a warm welcome and family dinner, but altogether too brief a visit. After a breakfast that was as delicious as dinner the night before we said our good-byes and headed off to Köln, or Cologne in english.

The Kölner Dom, or Cologne Cathedral, is simply amazing. The generations of work that have gone into the European cathedrals continues to amaze me. This cathedral was under construction for over 600 years, and it's two enormous spires present the largest façade of any church in the world.

While I certainly don't feel the holy spirit, the cathedrals we've visited on this trip have really impressed me. They're an integral part of the history on this part of the world -- and are still at the physical center of many towns.

The low light makes for a challenging environment to get decent photos, and their sheer popularity makes it enough more difficult to get unique photos, but I tried to focus on the more extreme angles and the people to differentiate my shots from the rest.

We left Köln to head back down the Rhine River, however I couldn't resist swinging back via Bonn to get some photos of street art we had seen the day before. Bonn has a significant American district, with street names like Kennedyallee and Martin-Luther-King-Straße. Trippy.

After a day of road-tripping and seeing sights, we arrived in Erlangen to see my brother's girlfriend. It just so happened that it was the last weekend of Bergkirchweih, the town's annual beer festival.

It was epic. I think the best way to imagine it is to picture the Ekka or the State Fair of Texas, and add 1L steins of locally brewed beer, girls in dirndls and guys in lederhosen.

All the local breweries were selling beer from cellars along the street. Their main beer was one they'd all brewed especially for the festival -- it was kind of like a hefeweizen but not quite as fruity. Damn good stuff. You put a 5 euro deposit on a giant 1L stein, and the vendors will re-fill it for 5 euros.

It was great to see folks of all ages mixing together and having a good time. All ages groups were represented - families, teenagers, adults, old-folk, all having fun and respecting each other and the event. No-one was concerned with checking ID, and no-one seemed to get really out of hand.

Then there was the food. Oh, the food. All the classic German street food was there - bratwurst, pretzels, and schweinhaxe amongst others. Here's a hot tip -- if your brother orders you a schweinhaxe (pork knuckle) "as big as you can" you may run out of room for beer. Just sayin'.

Today was the first of a few days on the road. We're giving the E-class rental a workout - we're off to Erlangen via Nuremberg to see Lisa, Shane's girlfriend.

Nuremberg (Nürnberg in German) is a very old city, and has been very important through German history. It was the unofficial capital of the Holy Roman Empire, the centre of the German Renaissance, and was chosen by the Nazi party to be the site of huge rallies and administrative buildings. Nuremberg was also the site of the famous Nuremberg Trials, at which German officials were prosecuted for war crimes.

The building pictured above is the Congress Hall at the Nazi Party Rally Grounds, a massive administrative building built by the Nazi's. The northern wing, below, is the Documentation Centre museum. We didn't have time to tour the museum, though.

Probably the most famous part of the rally grounds is Zeppelin Field, the site of the rallies themselves. It's largely fallen into decay, with a lot of what made the structure impressive already removed for safety reasons. The site is still used as a racetrack, of all things, with a straight blazing past the stands.

Despite it's decay it's an impressive structure. It's quite strange to look out over the raised hills, standing where Hitler himself stood, and imagine the might of the the Third Reich on display.

The next stop on the journey was into the center of town to Nuremberg Castle, a beautiful sandstone castle in the middle of town. It was basically built over the last 1000 years, and has a full-on moat and tower and everything. We saw the well, which took 10 years to carve down through the hill, and climbed the tower.

The steps up the tower were wooden, narrow and quite rickety feeling. It didn't help that the hand-rail was worn smooth, and a bunch of the steps leaning towards the middle of the tower.

Once at the top we were privy to a beautiful view of Nuremberg itself. The blue and white flag here is the flag of Bavaria; the black, orange and yellow one is of course Germany's flag.

I couldn't resist the urge to attempt a few street-style photos, with cliched black-and-white processing and everything. This is the only shot that really turned out though.

With this bit of history done, we're off to Erlangen and the Erlangen Beer Festival. That's definitely worth a post of it's own...