Day o' the 'Steins

Hallo!  I'm back after another long break.  Sadly, I don't have a good excuse, unless visiting my family in Texas counts.  I've been having such negative feelings about blogging this month and finally realized it's because Dachau was next up in our string of vacation posts.  Visiting a concentration camp is one thing, but remembering everything you saw and read and then retelling the terrible stories just doesn't sound like my idea of fun.  Finally, I realized (duh) that I don't have to blog about Dachau.  I'm doing this blog for our own personal memory book anyway, so I can leave out whatever I want.  Dachau, I'm leaving you out, at least for now.

These vacation posts seem like they're never going to end, but this was my ultimate dream vacation so I want to make sure I remember every part.  After Munich, we drove to Liechtenstein and stopped in a cute little German town on the way.  This cute little German town happens to be the home of the famous Disney castle.  Supposedly, it inspired Walt Disney when he was creating Sleeping Beauty's castle.  It was the most beautiful of all the castles we saw on our trip.

The town of Schwangau and Hohenschwangau Castle.  King Ludwig built this "tiny" thing for his son so he could have the big castle.

Neuschwanstein Castle, aka Sleeping Beauty's digs.

Proof that we were there :)

And that's pretty much it.  We ate lunch at a cute little restaurant on the lake and then headed for Vaduz, Liechtenstein.

Vaduz was STUNNING.  Liechtenstein is so tiny we never actually knew if we were in Liechtenstein or Switzerland until we arrived in Vaduz.  They have a sweet little vineyard, a castle (of course) and beautiful mountains filled with cows and wooden houses.

Don't you want to live here with a lawn-full of gnomes?

One of my favorite memories from the trip.

We drove up to the tippity top of the mountain and got caught in a traffic jam with cows.  I've never seen anything like this in person, so it was fascinating to watch.  The farmers were wondering why we were excited about a bunch of cows, and I love cows so much that I just wanted to get out and pet them all.  But I will admit that it got a little scary when they started crowding the car.  Thousands of pounds of anything is scary when it's coming at you in herds, even if it's just a bunch of sweet cows.

That's pretty much it for Liechtenstein.  It's tiny and the mountains are magical.  If you're ever in Austria or Switzerland, it's worth a day trip.  On a side note, did you notice I found the "create a collage" button on picmonkey?  I figured this was better than an entire page of pictures.