It happened. We did something crazy…well…not so crazy for us, I guess. We decided to tag along with Neil on his second Berlin work trip and it was absolutely the right call. I’ve never been to Germany and Denmark was the closest I’ve come to traveling on the continent. A few things pushed the needle towards going: 1) our girls are excellent travelers and have really good grades (so missing school wasn’t an issue) 2) Corra’s English class is studying a book about the Berlin Wall. 3) No real reason not to!
Overall it was an amazing trip and I added skill points to my “Travel Mom” skill tree.

(I’m going to break the trip into 3 posts to not make your eyes glaze over.)

Neil’s tickets were booked through work so he had an upgraded seat. Long and short is that I took his fancy seat for the long haul, red-eye to Frankfurt. He sat with the girls and no one slept really at all. Sigh. Also, they were unimpressed with airplane food, despite the novelty of being served a meal on a plane. Double sigh. My flight was lovely. Even though I also didn’t sleep.

We arrived on a Sunday morning, too late to make it to church and way too early to check into our hotel. Because we are planners, we knew this would be the case so we decided to take a train to the station close to our hotel, stash our luggage, then hop on a double decker touring bus. But first we walked a bit to see what there was in the way of food and we found donuts. Once on the bus, we went to the East Side Gallery to walk along The Wall. Layna wanted to continue her nap so she dozed with Neil. After that we hit up a huge flea market at MauerPark north on the north side. Had real bratwurst (universally liked, and why can’t our hot dog buns be that exceptional?) then made it back to the hotel for a nap.

Monday was St. Patrick’s day and Layna carried us all with her bold St. Pat’s unicorn shirt. We toured more hot spots and had lunch in an Irish pub in honor of the day. We loved the Brandenburg Gate and I loved the holocaust memorial. It was really a stunning thing to experience. After lunch we hit Check Point Charlie, the single most touristy spot in the whole city. Then Neil had to go into the office for a bit so we went back to the hotel to do homework. We ended with the Veggie Tales “Story of St. Patrick” because being in an entirely different country is no reason to break a tradition that must be 15 years old.