Back in the USA!

I had to go back to the US for about 10 days.  The trip was great and my awesome family came up to visit me while I was in Maryland!  It was great to see them and we got to go sightseeing in Annapolis.  What a great city!  Expensive as all get out to actually live there, but really nice place to visit.

Here's the fam back together:

And me with my sister!

Our trip to Annapolis was pretty quick, we took a whirl-wind trolley tour which was a lot of fun.  It was hard to snap pictures and keep up with all of the information but here are a few pics:

We did get over to the Naval Academy to look around.  The campus there is beautiful.  We wanted to go into the chapel but someone was getting married when we got there so we couldn't go in.

Here is a nice statue that the city put up in honor of first responders:

I really liked Annapolis a lot, if it wasn't so expensive to live there it would be a great town to live in for a few years.  I don't think I'll ever be able to afford to live there but I would love to go back and visit!

Bamberg

Lack of updates I know but as usual I've been really busy on the weekdays and weekends have been packed lately.  I got a chance to go back to the US, see update above so I'm only know updating the blog.

A few weeks ago I went to Bamberg to see a friend of mine.  I hadn't seen him in a while and we had a great time catching up.  He lives in a small village outside of Bamberg which was a really pretty farming community.

 We went into the city of Bamberg which has a lot of water flowing through it.  People call in the Venice of Germany, but they don't use the waterways in the same way.  In Bamberg, the waterways are not really used for transportation now.

 Of course nearly every town has some sort of cathedral.  My friend hadn't been to the one in Bamberg yet since he just moved there not too long ago.  I never get tired of looking at the cathedrals, they are always so impressive!

 We also went up to this rose garden that overlooks the city.  Some of the flowers were still in bloom and there were quite a few people looking around:

Bamberg also has a ton of painting on buildings.  One of the most famous in the town is pretty bizarre.  Apparently, the artist "ran out of room" to complete the painting, so they added this protruding baby leg statue to finish off the painting.  Can you see it?

 Another cool statue with gold painting on it:

 Apparently there was some sort of street festival going on and we ran across this band:

 Bamberg was an awesome town and very easy to get around.  Once we parked in the parking deck it was simple to navigate the city and see the sights.  Tons of shopping, sightseeing, and the food was fantastic!