Castle climbing and geodes galore in Idar-Oberstein...

Ahhh, yes... here are those photos I was talking about... the ones from our day trip that both my laptop AND camera decided to delete, sending me into a 12-hour tizz about how to recover them. It took all that time, but I found a FREE program that recovered all of the files that were not completely corrupt and a few files that were semi-corrupted (one of which I have pasted in below... it got turned into a pretty snazzy collage).

These photos were from a day trip to Idar-Oberstein, a city in the so-called "Gemstone Region" of Germany. The city has lots to offer, from a church built into the side of a cliff face to a castle you're allowed to just roam around in (free of charge) to a tower in ruins, perched on the edge of a rather steep cliff. The food in town is great authentic German and if you want to learn about agates and gemstones, there are several museums, an old mill and a mine to visit. We'd meant to visit the mine, but our GPS took us to the mill and by then, everything else was closed (it was around 1700 on a Sunday), but we still learned quite a bit! All in all, with the exception of some faulty directions and a camera catastrophe after the fact, this was a great day trip!