A Year in Sweden: Planes, trains and automobiles

Since our family is half male, half female, we try to do a mix of activities while traveling to keep everyone interested. But when our daughter headed up to Stockholm for a church youth conference while the rest of the family drove south to Germany, the boys became the majority. Luckily, I like vehicles, too, so it was a fun trip.

Passing a ferry that looked just like ours.

It's a long drive from Sweden to southern Germany--about 10 hours including an hour on the ferry from Denmark to Germany. We decided to break up the drive with a stop in Hamburg. Our son researched possible attractions and found that there is a Russian Tango Class submarine that has been converted to a museum. It is in the harbor right near the Fish Market downtown. What cold war baby could resist checking that out? This submarine was used as a Russian spy submarine from the 1970s until 2002, when it was bought by the Germans and renamed U-434. The "museum" is the submarine. We paid for entrance and then walked out across the bridge and down through one of the hatches. Then we went on a self-guided tour through the sub from one end to the other-- including crawling through a number of small openings. Submarine life is definitely not for the claustrophobic.

U-434

Walking out to the sub

Loading the torpedo tubes

There weren't many signs to explain things. But best we could tell, these pictures were
taken from the submarine periscope on some of its missions.
Recognize the lady in the middle?

We wished we could read some Russian.

Looking down a hatch to a lower level.

So many valves!

An example of the deluxe crew accomodations. This submarine had a
crew of around 80 men.

View coming up out of the submarine at the end of the tour.

A torpedo from the U-434

After the submarine, it was back on the road to our destination, Wolfschlugen-- a small town just outside of Stuttgart and my husband's business home away from home. While he put in a few days of work, my son and I explored the town on foot. I think we found every city park and bakery. We also found some fun hiking trails through forest on the edge of town. It is a cute town, very typical for southern Germany. One interesting thing we learned-- most of the shops, including the cafes, were closed from 11-2 every day. That made finding lunch challenging.

Fun fountain/sculpture in the center of town

The old church in Wolfschlugen.
We'd hear its bells every hour.

Inside the church-- the flat ceiling was a little surprising.
Portraits of the apostles along the back balcony.

The town hall

It was fun to see where my husband often stays. One evening we went to Nurtingen, a neighboring city, to go to his favorite Italian restaraunt. Nurtingen is much bigger and busier than Wolfschlugen.

Large church in Nurtingen

Interesting fountain

One afternoon, we took the car and I braved driving in Germany for the first time. I didn't do any autobahn driving. Just driving the way too narrow back roads was exciting enough for me. My husband told my son that he was to sit up front in the passenger seat and his assignment was to make sure I didn't hit any curbs, buildings, cars, etc. on that side of the car. He took this mission very seriously. There is a great shortage of speed limit signs, and Germany likes speed cameras, so I was a bit worried about that. But we made it without incident to the Ritter chocolate factory in a nearby town (and if the rental car company was sent any traffic tickets, they never made their way to us.)

The Ritter Museum--all about squares

If you are familar with Ritter chocolate bars, they are square and the company seems to be very obsessed with that shape. The main building had displays on where the ingredients for their chocolate come from, how the chocolate is made and the history of the company. The favorite was a little miniature model of the factory complex. When you pushed a button, a miniature candy bar dropped down, was driven around the model on a little car and then dropped out the slot to you. They also had a huge company store full of-- of course-- chocolate. I thought a lot of their packaging was quite fun.

An example of products available in the large company store.

Kids could sign up for tickets for a 45 minute "chocolate factory experience." My son thought that sounded fun. I pointed out to him that it would all be in German. He still thought it sounded fun. A year ago, he would never have braved a class all by himself in a language he didn't know. He has definitely grown from this crazy European experience.

When we gathered at the appointed time for his class, we were greeted with parental permission forms. A TV crew was there and was filming this session for the local news. So our son may have been on the news that night. We weren't smart enough to figure out when/where/or how to see. They gave the kids disposable lab coats to wear over their clothes and gave them a short explanation of how the chocolate is made.

A new building to celebrate the 100th anniversary this year.
The kids chocolate factory class was in there.

Then it was the fun part. They were each given a cup and got to pick a few different add-ins for their chocolate bar. My son chose sprinkles, corn flakes and smarties I believe. Then they poured melted chocolate into their cups and had them stir it well and then press it into a mold. There was a lot left after the mold was filled, and they all enjoyed eating their leftover liquid chocolate. Then they designed packaging for their chocolate while it cooled. They they unmolded their bar and got to take it home.

My son's custom bar. Looked just like one from the store.

If you don't have a 7-18 year old to make a bar for you, Ritter also had a cafe where you could pay to have custom bars made from a huge variety of flavors and add-ins. They had some sample pieces out so we tried chocolate with chilli powder and a few other odd things.

My husband took Friday off work, so Friday morning we headed out to boy heaven-- at least the males in my household loved it--Auto & Technik Museum in Sinsheim. My husband and I had been there several years ago on a visit to Germany and we knew our boy would love it. His eyes lit up like Christmas morning just driving into the parking lot and seeing all the airplanes on the roofs.

Auto & Tecknik Museum in Sinsheim

This museum is brimming with airplanes, cars, tanks, motorcycles-- every imagineable type of vehicle. Many of the airplanes are out on the roof and you can climb up inside them. And since they are mounted at fun flight angles, that can be rather interesting (and steep). The two most interesting planes are the Concorde and the Tupelov 144-- the only two commercial supersonic jets ever produced. This is the only Tupelov on display outside of Russia.

The Concorde and the Tupelov side-by-side.

The cockpit of the Concorde

The cockpit of the Tupelov-- definitely not as high tech even though
they were made at the same time

One of the planes even has a big tube slide attached to it so you can
slide from the plane down into the museum building.

Inside the buildings are the other vehicles. Such a huge amount and such a huge variety. Unlike US museums, the equipment is largely as it was when it was last used. There are bullet holes and rust and dirt. We find that more fun than the restored to factory-new condition strategy of most American museums. This is just a small sampling of the fun and interesting things we saw.

A sense of how much there was to see

This was one of Hitler's bullet-proof limosines.

A crazy music machine-- there is literally a little of everything
in this museum.

Cars, cars, cars, cars-- and that big black thing in the middle
is the engine from a huge ship.

Race cars and steam engines

A nice Ferrari collection

Did you know that Lamborghini made snow blowers?

An amphibious car

This is the "military limosine" that the VW forerunner to the
VW bug. I wouldn't associate military or limo with a bug.

The "most important tank of our former western enemy." US,
German and Russian tanks all stood side-by-side.

Merecedes everything-- even farm tractors

Tiny little 3-wheeled cars

One of the military exhibits

Our son found an outdoor area of military vehicles that
we'd missed on our first visit.

We spent a good 4-5 hours looking through the museum then ate some food outside at one of the food stands. Also outside, there were a number of carnival rides for kids. The funny part was that it was completely unsupervised. It was all coin-operated. Put in your coin, buckle your belt, and off the ride would go. And they were much bigger rides than the little K-mart carousels. That would NEVER happen in the lawsuit-crazy US.

We had toyed with visiting the sister museum in Speyer, but there had been so much to see in Sinsheim that we didn't get to it. Instead, we headed towards home. When we hit a traffic jam in Frankfurt, we hopped off the freeway to look for dinner. We wound up at IKEA. We found that hilarious. It was our first time in an IKEA-- and we did it in Germany. And we had yummy köttbullar (Swedish meatballs) for dinner.

Back on the autobahn, it was time to see how fast we could make our little Renault rental car go. We actually got up to 131 mph for a few seconds, but I didn't get a picture that time. It is challenging to get up to speed before either the unlimited speed section ends or traffic backs up in front of you.

129 mph and you still get passed...

We spent the night in Lubeck and then continued on by ferry to Denmark and then across the Oresund bridge to Sweden. We had just enough time to pick up some Pizza Hut in Malmö before racing back to Kristianstad. We pulled off the motorway and into the arranged meeting place, just as our daughter's tour bus pulled in. Perfect timing and a great trip!

The 3rd bed in our Lubeck hotel could fold into the wall.
Made me think of something from an old movie.

These last few pictures are out of time sequence but fit here better than anywhere. My husband and son went with a friend to a huge car show in Sweden in June. There are a number of collectors in Sweden who like American muscle cars. Funny to see here.