The kids and I were lucky enough to score a week and a half away during virus times – what an awesome treat after so many months in relative isolation! While Europe’s borders are technically all open now, it’s not super reliable yet to fly around and so we are sticking to places we can drive to. Luckily, there’s more to Germany than you see in the guidebooks! Stops #1 and #2 – Playmobil FunPark and Legoland, both in the Black Forest area of Germany.

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My kids love a theme park and this trip was no different! Playmobil is a great playground park that has tons of life-sized versions of the kids’ favorite toys – plus, plenty of Parcours areas, trampolines, and ropes courses for older kids. Legoland was awesome, too – bigger than I’d expected and lots of great rides. The kids kept saying how inspired they were to go home and play out everything they’d done!

As far as the virus situation, visitors wore face masks while in lines, on rides, or in waiting areas, and employees were constantly sanitizing and walking around with megaphones with a recorded message reminding people to sit and stand 1,5m apart. At Legoland, there were mandatory sanitizing stations just before we got on every ride! It was very reassuring, and made us feel we weren’t contributing to any virus spread while having such a great time! The other awesome part was that both parks were limiting ticket sales and had crowd limits in smaller areas – so it ended up being so easy to ride and experience everything without the usual crowd situation. Win!!!

From those parks, we were lucky enough to have Matt join us for the weekend in southern Germany/northern Austria, which is the Bavarian/Tyrollean Alps region. The highlights here were a knee-buckling suspension bridge walk between Castle Ehrenberg ruins, a summer toboggan run, and visiting one of the famous Mad King Ludwig castles – not Neuschwanstein, but its slightly lesser known cousin, Höhenschwangau.

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From there, the kids and I headed to Lake Constance (Bodensee), where we loved the rocky beach, stand-up paddleboarding, mini golf, and of course, plenty of ice cream!

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We finished up with a visit to a Zeppelin Museum and an Air & Space Museum, where we got to walk onto a bomber. It was a little surreal being around so many aircraft associated with Nazi Germany!

We were so happy to be ‘somewhere’ and felt so lucky to be out and about!

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