Exciting visitor!

Hi it's me again, Ethan. About a month and a half ago we had an exciting visitor at our house in Germany. This exciting visitor I'm talking about is our wonderful grandma, grandma Hopson. Sorry I didn't post about this earlier but like I said in my last post "I took a little break from blogging". Our grandma arrived at the Dusseldorf airport on March 25, 2010. I was so excited to see her. But on this day it happened to be a school day for me and Griffin so we had to wait a whole school day to see her. Finally it was time to go home and guess who picked me up? My mom and grandma!

My grandma had been here two days so far. My grandma stayed for two whole weeks in Germany. During these two weeks we had lots of fun stuff planned for her including two trips. One was to Amsterdam and one was to the Rhein-Mosel river area in Germany. We were going to go to Amsterdam first. We planned to stay there for two days and one night.

It had been two hours of driving and we finally arrived in Amsterdam at our hotel. We dropped our luggage off at the hotel and then we went to an art museum called the Rijks museum. At this museum there was a lot of paintings that were very cool! One of my favorite paintings was called "Night Watch" by Rembrant van Rijn. This was a very cool art museum.

For lunch we went to eat at a Hard rock Cafe which their food was awesome!

After we ate lunch we walked around a lot. Then we went on a canal ride from our hotel to the Anne Frank house! It was super interesting but disturbing to know this type of thing happened in the past. The residents of the secret annexe were Anne's family, a family of four; another family, a family of 3; and a man. The secret annexe they stayed in was cool but scary. There wasn't much light in the annexe because all of the windows were covered with dark screens and bolted shut. I found this experience very interesting.

For dinner we went to a Mexican restaurant. It was super good. They had good chili. It was a very suburb restaurant. After that we went back to our hotel and got ready for bed. I was very grateful because we had had a very long and exciting day and I was tired. Finally I lay in bed and fell asleep.

The next morning we went to a place called Keukenhof gardens. There they had fields and fields of flowers that had bloomed, they were so beautiful! They had so much flowers I can't get over it. I enjoyed this place because it was nice and relaxing. I really enjoyed this part of our Amsterdam vacation!

We finally arrived back home after another long car ride back from Amsterdam. It was a very cool and exciting vacation in my opinion. My favorite part of it was probably the Anne Frank house. I really enjoyed one night vacation.

It has been 5 days since we've gotten back from our over night Amsterdam vacation and grandma is still here with us. Guess what? today we're leaving to go to another over night vacation. This vacation is to Rhein-Mosel river area in Germany. Here mom says there is a lot of cool castles. I'm really excited for this vacation.

We arrived in the Rhein-Mosel river area in Germany after an hour and a half hour drive. We went straight to the castle runs this time without dropping our luggage off at the hotel first. The castle ruins we went to was called the Rheinfels castle. These castle ruins were huge although only half of the original castle was left. At this castle we did a lot of exploring and walking around. It was really cool. My favorite part was going under ground into the old mine shafts. It was very cool. We ate lunch, explored a little more and then drove to our hotel.

At the hotel in Amsterdam me, grandma, mom, dad, and Griffin all shared one room but in this hotel mom and dad shared one room and me, grandma, and Griffin shared one room. This was very exciting for me because my grandma always spoils me and Griffin so I was excited to stay the night in one room with her.

It's morning time and me, grandma, and Griffin all had a great night. Today we chose to go to another castle called Burg Eltz. This was a very cool castle. There was a lot of cool artifacts and we had a guide so we knew what stuff was. Yeah, we took a guided tour with a big group and it was very cool and I learned a lot about the castle. It was a big castle down in a valley. You had to go down a super steep slope to get to the castle. The guided tour took us through all of the rooms in the castle (which is a lot I must add) and told us all about them. This was a very cool castle and a good experience.

We returned home after a long car ride. My favorite part of that trip was the castle ruins where we got to explore.

My grandma still had a final week to go before she had to leave and here are some of the things we did in that final week:

• Walked by the Rhein river a lot (it was very soothing)
• Went to the Lego discovery center (it's still super cool and fun even though it was our 3rd or 4th time going)
• Aquazoo (there was so many cool sea creatures and fish)
• Downtown Dusseldorf Altsadt (went there two times, got ice cream, went to a boat museum, and scootered a lot by the Rhein)
• Roman Museum (Fun fact: a Roman city used to be located in the spot the museum's on which is in Xanten, Germany. They had lots of cool artifacts)

Sadly it came time for grandma to leave. I was really sad because I had a great time with her. She left on April 10, 2010.

Well that's the end of this post! Can't wait to post next.