Stuttgart Oktoberfest and a Random Visitor

By random visitor, I mean random. Katie is the older sister of my high school ex-boyfriend. Yup. That sounds a little weird. It actually turned out to be wonderful. I "dated" Dan when we were 14, so I feel it deserves quotation marks. He's actually the only ex-boyfriend I have who I still talk to. Dan and I are still good friends. His sister Katie had messaged me a few weeks ago asking how close I lived to Frankfurt as she had a few days on either end of a trip to Croatia. I had a chance to see her twice in one week. When she first arrived in Germany I took her for the day to see Koln and Trier, two "standards." She only had one full day at our house, and we made the most of it. This past weekend Katie was at our house hanging out until she left to go back to the states. Fall has come to Germany, and with it has come the dark, rainy, cool weather. I don't mind, but sometimes it can make travel plans a pain. After presenting Katie with a bunch of options, we took her to Burg Eltz castle. We've seen Burg Eltz before, but it was a castle which was in close driving distance. I think Katie enjoyed herself. It was actually neat to see the castle in wet, misty weather, which was much different from the sunny day we'd experienced before. Honestly it was just nice to spend some time with a familiar face from home, despite it being a touch random.

A gal I work with invited us to join her and her husband at the Stuttgart Oktoberfest. Well, it's actually called Stuttgart Constatter Volksfest. Oktoberfest. They had bought tickets for a beer tent, and had invited us and my friend Kristy. Everyone says Stuttgart is THE Oktoberfest to go to. We quickly accepted this invitation.

We went to Oktoberfest in Munich last year, and it was fun. Crowded and crazy, but fun. We did notice that everyone was wearing dirndls and lederhosen. We were in the minority wearing our jeans and t-shirts. Josh and I decided to invest in some "German" clothing for this festival. I think we look hilarious and awesome. We all met up in Stuttgart and first wandered around taking it all in. This looked similar to Oktoberfest (really all German festivals) - a carnival, a midway, games, food. It is much smaller than the Oktoberfest in Munich, but I liked it. It wasn't as crowded or crazy. We then went to the beer tent and got settled in. If you think you couldn't sit down and drink liters upon liters of beer for hours on end... you're wrong. You just haven't tried in the right atmosphere. I'll let you figure out the rest of our day through pictures...

And here I am winning a chugging contest... making Montana and my mother proud.

Josh and I both agreed Stuttgart was much more fun than Munich (I'm sure it had nothing to do with the company we had). Many Americans in our area claim Stuttgart is better than Munich, and I have to agree. It is our new favorite, and we are already making plans to go back next year.

I hope my beer-infused pictures were enough to make up for my lack of posting. We leave Thursday for our Greek island cruise - excited doesn't even begin to cover it. Just know after this break/silence there will be pictures and details of the cruise posted.