First stop: Baden-Württemberg area

What can I say? I fell in love with southern Germany. Maybe it was the perfect weather and fresh spring green and flowers and blue skies, but it was one of the prettiest places I've ever been. And for some reason, I wasn't expecting to love it so much. Having no expectations makes a new place even better, I think.

I started off flying to Stuttgart from Copenhagen on Saturday, April 9,

where I met Simone, a good family friend, and Nikki. We stayed with Simone in her cute little apartment for the next three nights, and got to explore lots of smaller towns around the German countryside. The first night we saw Tübingen, an old university town similar to the more famous Heidelberg. Nikki and I discovered radler, which is a beer/lemonade mix (which I personally like better than regular beer...). We had this quite often over the next week! It was beautiful at night with all the buildings lit up along the river, with a great atmosphere.

The next day, we traveled to Ludwigsburg (we became very good at the German train system by the end of the week!) and saw the palace there. It's one of the largest Baroque palaces in Germany and the gardens surrounding it are absolutely gorgeous. There was also an old car show in Ludwigsburg, which was fun to see. The weather was perfect and the flowers were all in full bloom. There was a children's fairy tale garden to explore, complete with a tower that had Rapunzel's hair coming down. There is seriously nothing more adorable than a little girl exclaiming "Rapunzel Rapunzel, let down your hair!" in German. I think we could have easily just sat in the garden all day, soaking up the sun and people-watching. We also stopped in Stuttgart to explore it in the evening, but by that point my heels were in protest from wearing my flats and I could barely walk, so we didn't stay for too long...oh, the pains of wearing cute shoes. Stuttgart was definitely a little less quaint and more industrial, but it was still fun to see everyone out in the good weather, sunning on the grass in the main square.

On Monday we took the train to Konstanz, which is a cute little town on a beautiful lake on the border of Germany and Switzerland. It was another gorgeous day and I even

got a little sunburned! There were great views and we went on a paddleboat out on the lake and ate ice cream and drank radler and even hopped over the border to Switzerland (but it wasn't very exciting). We were going to get our passports stamped as proof, but the guy wasn't at the window so we gave up. Ah well. I really enjoyed just walking around all these little German towns and soaking in all the German culture without being in all the places overrun with tourists. I think it made me appreciate Germany a lot more than if I had just gone to the big cities. I also loved traveling by train everywhere because the German countryside was so beautiful. Rolling green hills spotted with yellow and white and pink, with little red-roofed houses nestled in-between, church spires rising above them. I would happily move to any of these towns and live there! Seriously, every place I go, I just want to live there.

Next on the itinerary: Munich!