Landesmuseum Pirate Exhibit and Throw Daddy From the Train

We headed out in Stuttgart this weekend, despite the gray, overcast, and freezing cold day.  Since all the days are pretty, much just like that, it's hard to argue that the day is "too cold" to go out. If you follow that rule, you're in all winter it seems. 

So we went to the Alteschloss (the Old Castle) which houses a museum that had a Pirate Exhibit.  And these guys do it right. Dangerous rope swinging across the ocean between two ships:

I'm all for fun on the edge of maybe falling or getting "bruised", but I think I was the only parent wincing when one boy thought to put his head into one of the ropes from which to hang and cross over. Fortunately he decided that his hand works better. 

So in addition to the museum, we had lunch out... after merely one week our German is improving... we can vaguely make out menu items and take our best guess to order. We know how to say "Excuse Me" and "Thank you" and "I would like..." as well as "Have a nice day" so we're managing to get by.  And we have found that if our first waitress does not 'sprechen sie English', there's another one that can to help us out.  And we love, love, love the bakery on every corner. The kids do too as they peer into the glass at the beautiful variety of cookies, cakes, pies, and other sweet treats. It's hard not to get something!

But for sure the highlight of the day was getting stuck on the subway (aside: our piece of junk car is indeed: a piece of junk- it's in the shop and we're on the hook for about 350Euro=$450, so we took the bus/train system this day).  Anyway, there's an apparent disadvantage to not understanding the train recording when it tells everyone to get off the train because it's at the end of the line. The stupid Americans on board, not really paying attention, don't get out of their seats. They figure this is just a popular stop.  So late in the day on a Sunday, we wind up on a Subway car in the middle of a tunnel. Stopped. No emergency button, no emergency phone, no cell phone service.  It was like a bad B-movie. 

I'd like to say that Ric, nimble as he is, crawled out the exit hatch above, traversed the train to the front, adeptly swearing to someone in charge that his vulnerable family was still on the train! Except that didn't really happen. We got out. My "stuck on a train story" is not actually that exciting since it did start moving again in about 20 minutes and went to another stop.  But those were some nervous 20 minutes in the dark tunnel.

But we did manage to get on the bus, on the train, and back to our hotel. A successful day.