June 13 - Karlsruhe & Stuttgart, Germany

Again - I very much appreciated our daily schedule reminders so I never had to think about much of anything except having fun!!!

 Another lovely little home on a curve of the river.  Everything was so green and lovely.

 Stuttgart, Germany:  The center of Baden-Wurttemberg in southwest Germany.  2.7 million population in the area and highly advanced industrial with a well-earned reputation for economic strength, technology and high quality of life.  Home of both Porsche and Mercedes-Benz.  The German dialect here is called Swabian.  I was familiar with "high German" and "low German" from my Grandma Schultz telling me about it.

 We got to taste a local specialty called maultasche.

 Pasta dough, minced meat and lots of spinach and they say it concealed the meat during Lent so they wouldn't be sinners by eating meat.

 This is the awesome entrance to the Porsche museum.  How do they do that???  Stuttgart is called "car city" as in addition to Mercedes and Porsche they also have Audi, Skoda and Volkswagen.

 Had to take this picture - one of many - because it is my birth year and it was a car built after WWII of heavy metal.

 I guess when I sent the car photos to Chris and Alex he noticed the one name of the car called "Blue Tit" - Lucy told me this while she was chatting in the back seat of my car.

 And of course every farmer needs a Porsche tractor - so much for John Deere!!!

 3 floors, more than 80 cars in the museum and time for a break.  A driver's license for an 18 year old costs more than 3,000 euros (about $3500), 30 hours of driving and several hundred dollars to take the test - wow!

 And last stop walking through the Markthalle and I spotted the nougat - best nougat I've ever had so of course I had to buy about $25 worth - and now that I'm home it is going quite fast.  My brother and sister-in-law love it too!

 If you were born in this area in 1917 you would have changed nationality 3 times - Austrian, German, French.  We in America are awesomely blessed!
And the end of the day our tour director says there is a "mandatory cocktail hour" - I'm in!  Funny thing but the first night of the trip we met our friends and managed to get this awesome corner table at the back of the dining room and we got it every night after that right up to the last.  I guess we "owned it" and the wait staff knew us and were always waiting and happy to see us.