Christmas!

So, after my return from the states I came to the quick realization that I wouldn't be home for Christmas. I have been away from my family on Christmas one time before, and it really wasn't something I was looking forward to. But luckily, my friend Colin was also going to be away from his family for Christmas. So we decided to spend the holiday together. Instead of just sitting around my Charlie Brown Christmas tree crying about how sad we were that we weren't with our families, we decided to take a vacation! We were originally going to go to Poland (awesome, right?!) but decided against it because of our rental car situation. We ended up renting this beast of a vehicle:

Yep, that's right, we rented a SMART car! It was awesome! But, as awesome as it was, it probably wouldn't have been the safest thing to drive it 9 hours over to Poland. As my friend Erik always says about Smart cars, "they are like coffins on wheels!" So we took his advice and decided to travel to somewhere a little closer: Switzerland! We drove down on Saturday afternoon (only a three hour drive) and got into Switzerland that evening after stopping in the afternoon in Heidelberg (another LOVELY city in Germany).

It was really foggy out, but the trees were really pretty! But the fog blocked our view of the castle in Heidelberg.


Colin got to have a beer with lunch because he wasn't driving. I guess it pays off to be 26 and not have a drivers license!

Here are a few pictures that Colin took of Zurich at night. This a view out of our hotel room which was totally gorgeous!


Then we went for a night walk along the river (see above)


And found a cute Christmas market in the train station.

And then we just walked back to the hotel and slept. Sounds innocent, right? Well, I actually woke up the next morning REALLY sick. I ended up throwing up in our really nice bathroom and telling Colin to go out and see Zurich alone because I just couldn't get out of bed. It was horrible. So Colin went out and took some pictures instead. Here is the morning view from our hotel. Again, foggy.


It was getting late and time for check out, so I had to pull my cookies together and get us to our next destination: Freiburg. Colin really wanted to take the scenic route through the Black Forest, so that is just what we did. Here are some pictures from the Black Forest:



We pulled over to take a little walk through the forest, which was quite convient for me, because I had to throw up. That's right, I threw up in the Black Forest...a great memory for me. It was horrible.
We drove onto Freiburg and arrived in the afternoon. Once checked in I again crashed on the bed and made Colin play nurse. He went out a bought a thermometer, which showed what we though, high temperature. I didn't really get to see much of Freiburg because I was sick and throwing up the rest of the evening. NOT FUN!

The next morning I woke up feeling much better than before, but not 100 percent. We strolled through the city a little, I got a cup of soup, and we hit the road again. Our next stop was Tuebingen...we thought. When booking the hotel rooms online, I failed to notice the fact that it was actually in a city outside of Tuebingen. Oops. So we drove around for a few hours until we figured that out and then finally found the town we were supposed to be in. It was called Albstadt. Now, this was Christmas Eve so we were thinking we would maybe go out for a nice meal and then play our travel Monopoly game and then just relax and go to bed. Not really the case. When we arrived at the hotel it was actually closed and we had to call the owners to let us it. But once in the hotel was really nice. With regards to our nice Christmas Eve dinner: The owner of the hotel informed us that everything was closed except the McDonalds, Burger King and the Chinese restaurant. Uh...not the Christmas I was expecting...So we walked over the Chinese restaurant and it was CLOSED! NO! HORRID! We wouldn't even have a "fa ra ra ra ra" Christmas! So instead we just trecked back to the hotel and played Monopoly. Can you see the Christmas joy on my face?