Black Dot Day

 

Exploring days are called "Black Dot Days" here at the aquahaus.   They're days where we go see something new and then, when we get home, we put our black sticker dots on the giant map of Germany in the living room.  It's pretty much the most exciting thing we do.

So, for our anniversary yesterday, Paul planned a coastal train ride on this 125 year old original steam engine. I saw them shoveling the coal!  COAL!  They really used it!  And the train actually made that Ch-ch-ch-ch-Woooo-Wooo sound!  

My favorite part was when we went through a little street in a village and everyone on the sidewalks were taking pictures and waving.  You just can't help but smile and wave back--maybe like the Queen of England, even.

We rode it out to hike around Heiligendamm, the first German bath resort (founded in 1785).  With everything painted a bright white, right on the beach, and isolated in a forest, I could understand how this started that craze for German baths we read about in all those regency novels (So-and-so is ill and has gone to Germany to take the water, etc. etc.).

Riding the train home, we stopped in Bad Doberan to see the best preserved example of brick Gothic architecture.  Luckily, Bad Doberan was never bombed in the wars and the monastery lands around the minster were kept intact so the church stood in beautiful fields and parkland at the base of a tree-covered hill.

The inside made this the winner of all the churches we've seen in northern Germany, especially since so much of the decorations and so many of the windows were original from 1300.

And if that wasn't enough, we saw some 14th century tombs for the queen of Denmark, the king and queen of Sweden, and this insaaaaane baroque tomb of the Duke of Mecklenburg with life-sized mannequin-like statues of them standing on their rebuilt palace porch.

Yeup.

It was like a giant "BOO-YA" from the past.

I mean, right?