Summer Break in Full Swing

Catching up on a few weeks of activities. We finished up our first year at the Bavarian International School. David had one more presentation and both kids walked through the Magic Door, something they do in the primary school to advance to the next grade.

All of the 5th grade did a Romeo & Juliet workshop. I was confused about what this really was. Now, my understanding is that they never intended on doing a full presentation, it was just a workshop. They had several boys playing Romeo at different stages of the story and about thirty girls playing Juliet, several of them in an individual scene at times. This was very confusing. David was in the ballroom dancing scene and was a stage manager.

After the workshop every 5th grader was called to get a certificate of recognition and to walk through the Magic Door. The pictures are bad but you get the idea. The kids that have been here for several years do this each year. You actually grow a tiny bit when you walk through and you are ready for the next grade.

Here is a better picture of the newly revamped door. I think these kids are a little too big for this but Katherine really believes that she grew. She said she could tell when she stood on top of the stage after she walked through.

After the presentation all of the 5th grade had a party outside. Mostly they just played on the playgrounds. During this time Katherine was outside for her recess for part of the time and it was such a beautiful day her "Mother Tongue" class came back outside. This class, since she is native English speaking, is her German language training once per week. Other kids that go to this school and are not native English speaking take their native language classes at this time. Katherine's class was playing a version of duck duck goose in German. It was really a nice day. The weather has been really good for the most part. We do get a lot of rain but it usually does not rain out the whole day. The temperatures have been in the 60's and 70's mostly with only a few days in the 80's. It is a good thing too since we do not have air conditioning in our house. I am crossing my fingers August and beyond will stay cool, but we will see.

I probably should have Photoshopped the trash bins out of the above shot of the school Schloss.

Baseball is still going strong and we have again enjoyed the weather for watching. At home we are used to playing at the same complex of fields a few minutes from the house with the occasional tournament in the area. It has been really fun traveling to the other small towns around Munich and seeing the huge differences in the facilities. Last week we traveled to Regensburg about 90 minutes from our house and only a few kilometers from the Czech Republic border. Above Cindy captured a great shot with the ball flying into left field for David's fist double of the game.

He pitched one scoreless inning, played first base, and had a great day hitting. Over the two games he hit for the cycle with a single, double, two triples, and one inside the park home run. The Atomics won both games easily.

I liked this picture that Cindy took. The ball fouled straight down and kicked the sand up around the plate.

 David pitching. He has been the second pitcher coming in for the third inning each week. He is throwing more strikes every time and now has the second best ERA on the team. 

While the Garching Atomics Men's team are the Bavaria Champions for the past two years, Regensburg is the German Championship team. I guess you get a better field when you win that. The right field wall of the big field is the left field wall of the small field that David played on.

We did get an update on the new field for the Atomics. They are good to go and expect to have it completed for use by next season. We are staying in the same area and building the field where there are existing soccer fields that already have electricity and lighting. This saved a lot of money and allowed them to move forward with the plans. 

First Week of Summer Vacation:

On our family bike rides Katherine was wearing out fast with her small bike and RPMs to keep up at a slow pace. We got her a new German bike that is larger and with gears. We took it out for a spin last week a few times.

We rode all around the area and ended up at the Schleissheim Palace complex. Below you can see the new palace in the background 1.3 kilometers away on the other side of the garden. Glad that is not my yard.

The plan this summer is to have at least one kid friendly destination each week. This first week was a good one. There is a large amusement park about 90 minutes away. This is much larger than the Legoland places that we have seen at malls like the one in Grapevine Texas. It is a real life outdoor amusement park with Lego themed stuff everywhere. 

We arrived before they opened and planned on heading to the far part of the park to avoid any lines.

Our route took us right through tiny town. To me this was the most impressive part of the whole thing. We had just returned from Berlin so I made the kids stop for a picture. More later on tiny town. Here is Berlin above and below. They even had construction cranes since it seemed like new construction was happening all over Berlin. Even the new palace that they are currently building in the real Berlin was in this replica as a construction project, amazing. 

Yep, I made them stop again when I saw Venice. St. Peter's Square and the Doge's Palace, I have been there. Okay, we will come back later, off to the rides.

The first ride was a big dud. We were the first on it, didn't realize that you had to pedal yourself. Certainly didn't realize that after the crappy ride was over you had to wait until all of the empty cars in front of you are filled and gone. We literally sat in the stupid car for almost 15 minutes until enough people got in line to take the cars and go. What a stupid ride, NEXT!!

Now we are talking. We were trying to get to the roller coaster, I might of "accidentally" routed us to the building with the life size replica of a Star Wars X Wing Fighter made of Legos. It also had a rockin' ride with this robot arm that spun around and flipped you around all at once.

I love Star Wars.

Next we did make it over to the big roller coaster. It was inside of a huge castle that I did not get a good picture of. The big surprise was how willing Katherine was to ride this, she really didn't even think about it. She said she had fun when it was over. As we exited the ride we came across the photo booth that every amusement park has on their good rides. It was funny and a little disturbing to see the look of sheer terror on Katherine's face. She wanted to ride again so we did. This time when we exited I looked at the new picture, same look of terror. After we left I wished I had bought those photos. The good news is that she did it, and even claims to have enjoyed it and that she does not get motion sickness on roller coasters like someone else in this family (not me or David).

We had to get a photo with the giraffe to go with the one from Berlin. Below was a little canoe ride the kids did a couple of times.

This was a super nice part of the park with the Egyptian theme. It really only had one ride pictured below. This is the one ride that the small Legoland places have that we have been to in the past. Hard to believe there was such a nice building and landscaping for this one attraction.

There were a couple of carnival games and this play area up the stairs too. 

Another picture below to show the scale of how large these Lego structures were. 

The spinning twirling back and forth pirate ship ride.

Above is the animated, swimming Lego shark. Not kidding, this thing was moving, you can see the current it was making.

Even though it was cold and rainy the kids still water to ride the water gun boat thing. David rode it a couple of times and ended up getting soaked the last time.

They had this large structure that contained an aquarium you could walk under. David did not want to spend the time so we never went inside. He was in control of the agenda since this was part of his birthday celebration.

We also rode the Lego test track ride. It was the second largest ride there with one big drop. The rest of the track was very fast hairpin turns that threw you around violently. One ride was enough for us.

Above is the ride they rode dozens of times. It did not look all that great but they loved it. Below I was listening to the music from this water feature. We figured out later that when you stepped on the tiles in front of each instrument it would start playing the song. When several people participated it was a band. Pretty fun. 

More carnival games. We did not win. Katherine was actually the only one to knock down any of the clown faces out of the three of us. This guy's face was great when he saw that she could actually throw. Katherine got very intense and started pointing at which one she was going to hit.

We tried to sit through the balloon show, all in German. He did have me and the kids talk a little about being from Texas, then it was back to German. David got bored after about 15 minutes and we moved on. We crossed back by it later and saw the big finale where he blows himself up inside a balloon and does different things. 

This ride looks worse than it was. It was actually pretty peaceful. You would turn and flip but it was slow and you could somewhat control what you did by the position of the wings. 
They did the boat ride a couple of times and the spinning gears thing. They love to spin and they never seem to get dizzy.

The picture makes this look creepy. Live in person it looked cool.

This was just an observation tower that came up and down. They closed it right when David decided he wanted to check it out. All of the rides shut down an hour before the park closes. This was the time to finally spend some time at mini land. 

Neuschwanstein Castle in southern Bavaria. I was really really impressed with these creations.

I did not see the city of Munich but they did have the airport and the Allianz Areana, home of the mighty FC Bayern Munchen.

I took this photo of the Berlin replica since Cindy and I were just there. It is the street that we stood on to watch Germany in the World Cup. They even show some of the features of the fan zone.

I just took this close up of the Reichstag building from Berlin to show the amount of detail they put into these creations. Below is a picture that I took last month from far away. It is cropped to try to show the same area. I am at a side angle in the real photo below, but I think the point is made.

They did have many other mini land creations from Switzerland, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and several stars wars scenes. It was so big. One more below in front of the Rialto Bridge in Venice. 

On our way out we caught the Lego cowboy guy and got a going away picture. I think the kids had a really great day.