Christmas Day, Black Forest, Germany

And will the real Christmas day please stand up!!! -- Finally the 25th December arrived - and we found ourselves in Hotel Schloss Hornberg preparing for Amos and Beatrix's wedding. We had our own small family celebrations in the morning which included reading our nativity story book and giving Caleb his now-favourite toy in the world - a duplo digg-digg train. We played jumping on the bed, received a cool advent-calendar train from Amos and Beatrix, ate a huge 5 course dinner entertained by a harpist, witnessed a commemorative canon firing, and all-in-all had a great day celebrating. We missed our families and usual people we would be seeing at Christmas time but we enjoyed the celebration and excitement of remembering Jesus birthday - OUR GREAT SAVIOUR!!!

More fun in Nice, France

Beautiful sunsets, leisurely bike rides along the boulevard, wandering through Christmas markets, exploring the cobbled streets, coast walks with breathtaking views - ah holidaying on the French Rivera, don't we sound all rich and famous!!!

Christmas with Phil and Lyndel in Nice, France

We had a great Christmas Day (actually the 23rd Dec) with Phil and Lyndel in the beautiful Nice in the south of France - yes Nice is nice!!! We enjoyed some beautiful weather and we loved our cute French apartment. We whipped up a yummy Christmas dinner of chicken and pork with apple sauce and vegetables followed by some German Christmas cake - stollen. We were very proud of our little Christmas Tree which we even managed to decorate using sticky tape and individually wrapped swiss chocolates and some tinsel aquired by some nifty sneaky work by Lyndel.... We had a reading of the Christmas story of Baby Jesus and then $10 secret santa presents. Caleb took it upon himself to be santa and hand out the presents when he saw that everyone else was taking too long!! He pulled it off perfectly as no one ended up with the present they had bought - top work santa!!

Lucerne, Switerland

Ah beautiful Switzerland - even though all the mountains were hiding behind clouds the entire time, we could still tell the views were amazing.
A beautiful layer of fresh snow, a relaxing lake cruise, a crazy adventure up the alps (where it was -11 degrees!!!), fantastic kids shopping trolleys (how cool are they!!!), exploring lucernes city wall, cool glacier caves (that's the blue photos...), expensive funny tasting cheese fondue, yummy chocolate fondue, uber amounts of cheap but beautiful swiss chocolate - what more could you want!! Some views of the mountains would have been nice, oh and not having caleb puke for 2 days but we had a great time hanging out with Phil and Lyndel and an interesting trip to Nice to finish it off!!

Colosseum

Well, we were staying in an apartment only 100 metres from the Colosseum, so we had to visit one day. Amazing to imagine scenes of revelry, death and fighting. Sometimes its hard to convince Caleb how amazing it is though. Often the rubbish bins, or the statues with missing heads are much more interesting for him.