31 Adventures and Adventure #1: Cologne Cathedral (Köln) and Chocolate Museum

Many of you know that I am now a whoppin' 31 years old. To make sure that this year of 31 is as wonderful as I can make it, I've decided that I am going to try and make sure that 31 adventures happen in my life this year. I am leaving the definition of "Adventure" open, since sometimes an adventure can be something like giving up sugar for a week, or consistently getting up early, or running a race...or...or...or...

...But there will definitely be a heavy leaning toward physical, get-out-and-enjoy-Europe adventures, simply because it MUST be done! 

So - duh-duh-DUUHHHH: Adventure #1: Cologne Cathedral and Chocolate Factory happened a few weeks ago (forgive me, I am catching up!).

We have a wonderful friend named Emily that just happened to be visiting Cologne while her husband was doing some research there. Since Cologne is only about 45 minutes away, it was a complete NO BRAINER that we were going to make our way over there and spend a day with her while she was in town. PLUS - Cologne is an awesome city, touting some awesome sights which we had yet to see.

We got up a little bit early, loaded up the kids (Juni in the mei tai, Bridger in the stroller) and headed out. After a small fiasco* trying to figure out how to buy a train ticket to a city spelled with an umlaut in it (it was way harder than we thought it would be - come on, German train ticket machines! Why can't you bow down to awkward Americans!) we got on a bullet train (woohoo!) and were off! Bridger loved the super-cushy train, which was full of business people since we were traveling in the morning on a weekday. Most of them seemed relieved to see a couple of little kids - something out of the ordinary - on their commute. 

We'd planned to meet Emily at the Cologne Cathedral, which just happens to be right outside of the main train station, and also just happens to be COMPLETELY MASSIVE. I am not even over-exaggerating. At all. I knew it was massive on our way there, but I couldn't have prepared myself for the massiveness that I saw as we walked out of the train station and looked up:

Photo credit: http://rogue-alien.deviantart.com/art/The-Dom-Cathedral-322485621

Bam. 
Cathedral. 
And not just a Cathedral, but basically the largest cathedral in the world. It's as long as 1 1/2 football fields, and 75 yards wide. But what really makes the gigantor-factor hit home is the towers: they're even taller than the thing is long, at 472 feet tall (about 175 yards). So, this thing is big. So big that they started construction on it in the 12th century, ran out of money (and probably motivation) and then decided to finish it in the 1800's. So massive that when they finally finished it, they started having to repair it right away. So massive that I still can't get over it. While writing this post, I've been sitting here, whispering to myself under my breath "man...that thing is just so massive".
It's so huge, that the picture above is not mine. There was no place I could stand that would either get the whole thing in the frame or do it any justice. But here's a picture of us by the front doors, for scale:

*Dink* - Do you see those tiny little people at the bottom of the picture in the middle? Yeah. That's us. I am lucky I stuck my arm up, or there's no way you'd ever pick us out. AND we were still standing like 50 feet in front of the church...you can see the massive doors behind us. 
We were but small ants...
But yes - so this is where we met up with Emily, and man, what a good friend (SO dang good to see her) and man...What a cool place. 

Berkley and the kids looking at the
giant, ancient, golden box that is
believed to hold the relics of the Three
Magi. Yes, Bridger is trying to
squeeze Juni's head. 

The cathedral was originally designed and built to house what is believed to be the remains of the Three Kings that visited the Christ-child (see that out-of-focus golden box to the left?). Pretty cool!  Looking at it from the outside was just mind-boggling. So massive (there's that word again) and every square inch of it's stone exterior was painstakingly carved, designed to be beautiful, but part of a great whole. When you walked in, it was hard to know where to start - partially because it was really dark, but more so because it was just so big, and was filled with ancient, cool stuff. And it was just so big...Think about the biggest cathedral you've ever been in, now lay about six of them end to end...that's what the inside felt like. 

After exploring the interior, Emily and her mom (with whom she was traveling) offered to watch the kids while Berkley and I climbed to the top of the tallest tower. Super-fast-impromptu date?? Sure! So off we went. Remember how the tower is super tall? Well, the only way to the top is taking the stairs - 509 of them, to be exact. It was quite a workout. The steps were cool - worn away by time and thousands of feet, and we just spiraled up, and up, and up. At one point there was a little hallway that led away from the tower (which we had to explore, OF COURSE!) and we discovered a legion of giant church bells, which I'd never seen in person! The hallway also afforded us this view, showing that even today, the cathedral is under continuous repairs and renovation.

As we ascended the final, more open and recently built stair case that took us to the top of the tower, we were also able to see, more closely, the detail on every inch of the cathedral. Here's a picture I took of one statue, just one statue. 

It was an angel, holding out a piece of cloth that was draped across her outstretched hand. The detail was insane. I pointed it out to Berkley, who then said "Man - and it's crazy to think that that is just one statue, on one tower, facing the inside...and that when it was originally made, no one would ever see it from the outside...".

Like I said, mind-boggling, huh?


When we did finally get to the top, we could peer out at the city below. Here's what we saw:

View from the top!

Not only the Rhine River, but see all of the other, normal-sized cathedrals dotting the city? You can see 4 in the above photo, but there were 12 additional Romanesque cathedrals dotting the city, all dating back to the 1200's. Cool, huh?

And still, they were utterly dwarfed by the presence of the Cologne Cathedral. Insane.  

There's more pictures of all of this at the end, so I'll spare you for now. 

After a brief but delightful look at the top, we headed down, down, down the 509 spiraling stairs, which felt like an eternal down-stair treadmill, and were

Bridger and Logan getting some well-deserved goof-off time.

happy to greet this goofy crew at the bottom. Then we loaded up the kids and headed off to a German-Roman Museum!

The museum (which was literally right next to the cathedral) was fantastic. They put it in that particular spot because in WWII they were digging out a bomb shelter when they came across this amazingly-preserved, huge Roman mosaic. RIGHT THERE. 

Berkley, Juni and the mosaic I mentioned in the background.
I wish you could have seen it! Each tile was perfect.

They built the museum around the mosaic to preserve and display it. It was beautiful! Looking at it, and the other stuff there, like Roman jewelry or an original Roman arch, totally brought me back to Greek/Roman daydream land I used to find myself in often during 7th grade history class.

Berkley, checking out a head-piece of gold leaves.

Pretty amazing culture, pretty amazing stuff - and way too much of us to soak up within the attention span of three toddlers...


...so off we went to the Cologne Chocolate Factory/Museum!

Original Roman Arch that was at the Gateway to the city.
Cologne was right on a major Roman highway. Freakin' cool.
This was also right before I forgot that Juniper existed (for
just a minute) and happened to remember to look for her
right when an entire class of 14 yr old surrounded her, looking
confused as she tried to step up on the display...oops.

We walked/took a metro to get there, which ultimately left to an odd separation between our family and Emily's family. When we did finally meet back up again, Emily informed us that they'd managed to come out of a door of a building exactly when a bride and groom were supposed to be exiting the same building. There was a whole crowd of people waiting outside, and when they walked out the doors, everyone released a bunch of balloons and started cheering! Emily's 20-month-old Logan loved it, and thought the balloons were for him...haha! Oops.

The Lindt Chocolate Museum was awesome (and delicious, of course!). At one end of the museum they had what was basically a scaled down, real chocolate factory, which made the small chocolates that they handed out to people who bought entrance tickets. It was sooooo coool to see the process, the churning chocolate (which churns for days!) as well as the chocolate fountain at the end.

You guys. 
A Chocolate Fountain. 
With Lindt Chocolate pouring out of it. 
It was my dream come true. 

And they even had a sweet little lady there handing out wafers dipped in the chocolate fountain to anyone that walked by. We soon found out that it didn't matter how many laps you made...she would always give you one more!
Juniper was pretty blown-away by it all. Here's her reaction:

 We were all pretty toasted by the time we were done with that, so we headed back to meet up with Emily's husband and grab some grub. On our way, we passed by this thing again - it was just as impressive as it was earlier in the day. Once again - note tiny people passing by at the bottom for scale. Insane. 

A nice photo of me & Emily

Now - Can I just take a second to say how nice it was to see a friend this day? Really - it was so fun to laugh with someone and have someone laugh with me - and at me :)  There's really nothing like living in a country where you don't speak the language to help you appreciate a friend that understands your puns or sarcasm! Plus Emily is the best, her mom is hilarious, and her little boy couldn't be more cute (and she's got another little bean on the way - yay!). Oh, and a shout-out to her for sharing some of her photos with me for this post! The not-phone-looking ones are all hers :)

How I really felt about the fact that
Emily was standing in front of me

After dinner we parted ways and we Walkers headed back to Dusseldorf. It was late, and the kids were pooped, but we were happy. In fact, we were so happy-pooped that we managed to blindly walk onto the wrong, last train after getting back to Dusseldorf and only realized it when our only option home was to walk 40 minutes to get back on track. Oops! While we were pooped, it was nice to talk and reflect, and it just meant that we slept extra good that night. 

Below are some extra photos of our adventure!

Juniper sitting behind just one of many, many sets of pews in the cathedral

Tiny us, eating a snack outside

Berkley and I inside of the tallest tower, just as it opened up

Going down the seemingly-endless staircase

Berkley and Bridger checking out step one of the chocolate brewing process

Churrrrning chocolataaate....mmmmm

Chocolate being drizzled into molds

A chocolate version of the cathedral (really??!) Perfect, huh?

THE FOUNTAIN. 

Me and the awesome little lady who handed out chocolate all, and a still-chocolate-dazed Juniper reaching mindlessly for another wafer dipped in the chocolate fountain of youth

Happy Walker Crew!