This morning we woke up to another beautiful day. We drove our car to the other side of the river to park as our hotel had none, so we got a beautiful view back towards the town and castle when we came back over the bridge. 
Here is our hotel - The Hotel Muller. After an amazing breakfast we went exploring. Our main goal was to find the bottle of wine that we drank the night before and buy a couple of bottles to bring home. Well we got sent on a wild goose chase because the lady at the desk didn't understand what we were looking for even though at first it seemed that she did. 
We were sent to this shop and even though we couldn't find the "one" we were looking for, we found lots of others. When we asked about which wine she would recommend she whipped out about 6 glasses and started pouring us three different types of wine to try at 10AM!!! I was feeling pretty toasty afterwards and couldn't finish the third glass, but we bought a bottle of each. Great marketing tactics though!!!! I forgot to get a picture the first time around so I asked to take another and she said you couldn't take a picture without a glass in your hand so she filled up another one for Kevin.
Kevin and I always come up with crazy ideas while on vacation and after seeing that you could buy grape vines....we thought...heck we could start our own winery when we go home. When we got our heads out of the sky, we thought it might be kind of cool to grow a few vines and make our own. Wonder if they export to the US????
We climbed a wicked steep hill to Cochem Castle. It felt like Nueschwanstein all over again but not as tall of a hill and now pushing two kids. It was a great view from up above. We didn't got into the castle because we were waiting to tour Burg Ehlz later in the day. We stopped for a quick lunch at the cafe half way down the hill. I tried asking for a recommendation but the waitress only spoke a little English and we didn't quite sync up on things so I just ordered a bratwurst. Addison got her usual pomme frites (french fries) but quickly turned away from them after trying the ketchup. It seemed to me to be like a homemade version with loads of paprika in it.
After our wild goose chase to find our new most favorite wine, Kevin finally went into the hotel's resturant and got the wine menu and asked where to get the specific wine. The gal offered to sell Kev the two bottles she had left for 7.60Euro each...we were floored because he spent 16 Euro on the bottle he brought up to our room last night. She did give us directions to the Loosen Winery where we could buy the actual wine. When we got there we couldn't find anyone around, so a passer by pointed to the front door of their home and said to ring the bell. The kids were sleeping in the car so I stayed back while Kevin went in. He was greeted by an amazing women who spoke absolutely no English and Kevin spoke absolutely no German, but they both got it figured out on what we wanted. We both tried about 4 different types of wines and thanks to my grandpa teaching me how to count to 10 in German I could tell her that we wanted to buy "veir" bottles of wine.
Next we headed out towards the highly acclaimed Burg Eltz Castle. Kevin had cleverly figured out how to plan our whole route before we left through Google maps and then to our Tom Tom. Well what we soon discovered as we got close to the castle that "Jane" was trying to take us right to the castle, not the closest car park. So we went back into town and headed to the closest car park. Well, after we got the kids loaded in the stroller and headed towards a little sign that pointed towards the castle we quickly found out that we weren't where we thought we wanted to be. We ended up at the base of the hill and was going to be trekking through the woods on a 40 minute stroll. About 15 minutes in we found that it wasn't a simple little stroll, we ended up in some pretty serious rocky gorges and narrow pathways and steep rocky hills. There is really no turning back at this point so we went on both fearing that we had a really steep climb once we actually got to the castle and we were going to have to come back through all of this to get tot the car. The woods were beautiful though and down below our path was a little river babbling away.
When we finally did get to the castle it was beautiful, but yes indeed we had to climb up about 140 steps. After several attempts to get a family picture, we went to get our tour tickets and waited for the English speaking tour. As we got to the door they started to close it. We asked if we were going to be able to make it on the tour and they attempted to be polite and say that it was full now and we would have to wait for the next one. The guide sent me out to the front ticket office who then said they didn't know when the next English tour would be sent me back out to another person who told me to ask back at the ticket office. So gave up on the English tour and thought we'd just go on the German guided one. We thought "What the heck, as long as we can see inside the castle" Well, we got in line and once we got to the door they cut us off again. This was a bit ridiculous. Finally someone came out of the little red door and said they would maybe do another English tour in an hour...it was now 4:30 and we had at least 45 minutes getting back to our car and a 2 hour drive to our hotel in Heidelberg. So completely tired and frustrated we gave up and got a refund on our money and hiked back through the woods to the car.
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