Germany Road Trip

We've been meaning to write about this for a while. Actually it was kind of meant as a Christmas present for Al and Laura. We went on a road trip before leaving Germany. We managed to get a rental car from Duesseldorf, and after figuring out the GPS and the roads, we were on our way. First destination: Rodenhausen.

There's a reason you can't find out anything about Rodenhausen on the internet. It because it's actually now officially a part of Lohra. Rodenhausen is the town in which Jacob's great- great- great- some more great grandfather was born. He later became a Hessian soldier and moved to America. We wanted to see what it looked like.

It was a beautiful drive about 2 hours away from Heiligenhaus. We found it almost by happenstance by seeing a road sign called Rodenhausen. This place was tiny. Not more than 100 or 200 people lived there. Our first stop was a cemetary, hoping to find Casper Cable's relatives. But all of the graves were pretty new. We met a native of Rodenhausen, who told us that no one of her generation knew anything about the generations before, where they are buried now or anything else. That's a shame. She was very helpful and friendly--I believe we only spoke in German with her--she was surprised we'd come all the way out from America to see this place.

We visited a church that had been around for several hundred years. And we imagined that this is where Casper went to church. It was a cute little town, but so small that the nearest restaurant was miles away.
Here's some videos: (Errr the videos won't post. Maybe later)

We also visited Lohra, which was unquestionably bigger, yet the graveyard here was still relatively new as well.

Visiting this part of the world renewed and refreshed our interest in our ancestors. Note to Jacob's Mom: we would love it if you could send us any pertinent information about Casper Cable and his family that you have learned.

We continued on our road trip to the Frankfurt temple. First we stopped and ate some Iranian food, which I unfortunately did NOT like. Jacob ate his everpresent doener which never fails him. I don't actually remember what it was that I ate, but its flavor would take getting used to. It was the first time I went to a temple outside of the States. It was small but beautiful. We were surprised

to learn there were full-time French speaking missionaries there. Frankfurt is the closest temple for the French, who have no temple. It was special to me to go through the temple in the German language. I have adopted the Germans as another culture, and I even married a man whose heritage is German. Consequently the temple was a beautiful experience for me.

After that we wanted to be on our way along the Romantic Road, but it was already getting dark. We hit a couple spots there, and we'll share the highlights in photos:
Jacob liked this part because we snuck in with a group to go down to... the wine cellar. It turned out to be a wine tasting party, so we left early, but it was cool to see the massive barrels at the bottom of the castle in the basement as large as the castle itself.

Here's a picture of me with the statue in front of it:

We had some Italian gelato in the shape of spaghetti...yum! Sorry about the sideways pic


Rothenburg ob der Tauber was probably the cutest town we'd yet seen. Unfortunately, it was completely dark and everything was closed. We'd had an interesting incident with our GPS... it died. Which is amusing to lose GPS when you are out in the middle of nowhere on the Autobahn in Germany. We were about to buy a new one when someone told us there was a Eurocar just around the corner, open til midnight. So we switched the broken one for a new one. But that took a little while. We also saw the notorious red flash on the Autobahn, which usually means you get a ticket. We've heard nothing so far, so maybe we got lucky.

This town was surrounded by a medieval wall, kind of like San Giminano. We actually got up and walked on top of the wall, and it was fun to pretend we were defending the castle.


We got back super late but all in all it was a very successful road trip.