The last weekend of October my friend and I took a trip to the Bodensee, AKA Lake Constance. It is bordered by Austria, Germany, and Swizterland. We stayed in Lindau which is an island connected to the rest of Germany by a bridge. It was a quaint little town where we could walk from one side to the other in 15 minutes, tops. We parked in one of the few places on the island to park a car which was by the train station. We arrived very late on Friday due to waiting on husbands to get home from work and such. It was a 3 hour drive, but we stopped for a dinner at an Italian restaurant and split a pizza and had salads. Therefore, it was dark and quiet when we rolled our luggage across the cobblestones from the parkplatz to the hotel.
We awoke to a delicious breakfast prepared by someone
else (That's all that matters when you are on vacation from mothering!) Then we stepped out into a glorious and very comfortable with a coat on weather. That's pretty amazing considering it was October in Germany.
Our day was filled with light houses, lion statues, a harbor, and swans!
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| See the swan coming right towards me! |
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| Silhouette of lion statue and the lighthouse across the harbor |
Don't forget a crazy old church too! Every trip has some old religious wonderfulness. This church is the Church of Saint Peter, also called Fischerkirche, or the Fisherman's Church. It's more than 1,000 years old.
These frescoes were of the Passion of Christ and the lives of St. Peter and St. Christopher. They were done by Hans Holbein the Elder. There is another fresco of the Crowning of the Virgin Mary by a an artist from Lindau. This Catholic Church is no longer in use, but it remains open to the public squeezed between some shops and houses. The whole church was the size of my living room.
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| Hans Holbein the Elder's Frescoes |
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| The Crowning of the Virgin |
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| This is the center of town where they have an actual glockenspiel that plays everyday. |
We took a peek and a prayer in the parish church of Lindau called the Lindau Abbey. The next day was to be Sunday, so we checked out there Mass times and decided to come back the next day.
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| This is the working Catholic church in town that we went to Mass in on Sunday. What a treat! |
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| Corner chapel in the back |
The ceiling was my favorite part. It made me feel heaven.
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| The ceiling |
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| My travel buddy |
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| We went up the lighthouse. |
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| View from the lighthouse |
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| Another view from the lighthouse |
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| Selfie at the top of the lighthouse |
On our way home, we went ever so slightly out of our way to see this
basilica in Birnau. I thought the Abbey was beautiful, but this was exquisite beyond words. The stinky thing is they don't let you take pictures inside the church. I bought several postcards to aid my memory. The Stations of the Cross were a highlight. They were three dimensional stations coming out from the wall. Veronica wipes the face of Jesus was special because a cherub/angel held the cloth with the face of Christ next to the station.
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| Basilika Birnau |
I arrived home to find my family entertaining friends for dinner without me. That's when I got the news that Bobby walked the length of the living room multiple times while I was gone.
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