an afternoon in Freyburg

We were initially planning on leaving for our trip on Saturday afternoon and spending two nights in Bamberg on the way to Munich, but Bamberg was booked up. It seems that we weren't the only ones with the idea of combining trips to two different beer-tourism locations. And so we made some alternate plans.

Since we already had our rental car (which you have to get on Saturday anyhow as everything is closed on Sunday), we decided to head to somewhere near Jena to check out a castle. There were three obvious choices, the Wasserburg in Kapellendorf, Leuchtenburg in Kahla, or Schloss Neuenburg in Freyburg, where we went with Marie. We opted for the latter, as there's a nice museum there, and our friends Calin and Susanne came along for the day as well.

The weather was a bit better in that it wasn't raining, but it was quite blustery up on the hill where the castle is located. Here's Jeremi and I with Owen standing by the castle wall, with his long long hair a-blowin' in the wind.
The view from the top of the wall was quite nice, looking into the river valley below.
I carried Owen around in his carrier for part of the day, but he wasn't overly impressed, probably due to the bulky vest he was wearing at the time.
Here's Karen in one of the castle's narrow and short doorways.
After a few hours looking around we were all hungry, and decided to get some food in Freyburg before heading back to Jena. We went to a nice Greek restaurant, which fed us all well. We parked by the very swollen river, which was much higher (and browner) than usual after the enormous amounts of rain we'd had. Here's a not-great picture showing where there's usually a dam with about a meter drop, which barely makes a bump in the water. The lock upstream of this was completely submerged.
And finally, a random picture from our trip to pick up the rental car that morning. This is hard to see because of the reflection in the window, but this optician's storefront in Jena has a big display about Canada in the window, complete with tourism posters, an atlas open to the right page, a toy train from VIA Rail, some Nordic walking poles (which are much more popular here than in Canada), and a whole bunch of glasses randomly perched on top of the display. It is an optician's shop, after all.