There and back again by, Samuel

Hello! I'm Samuel. For this blog post I'm you're guest writer. If you don't know who in the world am I, I'll give you a few words: I am 12 years old and in the 6th grade. I am 5'6''.  I've never written a blog post before, but I think it's worth a shot! Mamma thought I should write this post because there were a whole lot of things she missed out on when I was at the conference in Prague.

First there's the trip to talk about. This time we drove and didn't fly. When I heard Dada tell Emma and Luca that we were going to drive they rejoiced because they are sick of Ryanair (the airline we often use to go on trips), but if I were them I'd give it a second, maybe a third thought about it. When I heard the news I was like, "What!?" This was new to me, not flying and driving from Italy to the Czech Republic. I mean it's pretty far.
When we got in the car that we rented, we were so cramped in there with all the food and stuff to bring. I was the only one who had to bring homework. Just think about it. You're in a small car with only five seats with a fat bag between your legs that weighed, I don't know, 20-30 pounds!
Once we got halfway down Strada Salga I felt like I forgot something! I looked into my bag and I didn't find my camera! Papa and Nano's birthday present! We had to turn around and then we were on the road (again!)!

Road Trip Car Fun

We drove five and a half hours in the car from home to Munich, Germany. We went to three new countries in one day. That's a family traveling record we set. We went to Switzerland, Austria, Liechtenstein, and Germany.
Switzerland was sort of a deja vu for my parents (the last time we were there was in 2007, which was the second blog post, but since I was only 3 I barely remember it). I took some beautiful pictures of the Alps and running streams.

Eating dinner in Lichtenstein with Castle behind me

Then came Austria, which was kind of cool, but I found Lichtenstein the most inspiring for the book I'm writing. I imagined a small village on this hill. I asked Dada what he thought would be on that hill. Unsurprisingly, he said Edoras (Lord of the Rings location) would be up there.

In all the trip for me was unpleasant at first not being used to it, but then we got used to it and were OK; plus we listened to the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer before we got to Germany.
Once we got to the Westside of Munich it was 10:00. No night-time reading for me! We got settled in there in no time. Emma and Mamma got separated in another room leaving me with Dada and Luca. I called these two rooms the "guys' room" and the "gals' room". Dada and I couldn't sleep until midnight (mainly because Luca stole my entire bed while he was sleeping)!
When we woke up, we checked out and set off to Starbucks to get some mugs, for what I call the "mug hoard", with Germany and München written on them and, of course, a cup of coffee.
After that we went to the Dachau Concentration Camp. It was just days away from the 70th anniversary of it's liberation. We took a two and a half hour tour of the place. It felt like a pretty sad place to me, how people were stripped of all their freedom and dignity. Only twelve toilets with no privacy for 800 people. A cremating furnace to burn the bodies. A gas chamber that looks like a shower to fool the people (even though it was only used to for gas experiments, not mass executions at this location). Seriously, notice that what happened should never happen again!

After that we set off for a four hour drive on part 2 of the trip from Munich to Prague. This trip was a little more pleasant than the day before now that I was used to it. But then things got complicated a little when we were stuck in traffic and Dada missed the turn to get to the hotel so we had to make an entire circle around it taking longer for us to get to the hotel. Luckily we got there barely in time to eat dinner. We arrived pretty late to the kids program where I found out they had been playing a bean bag game for a while before we got there. We went to eat breakfast at 8:00 every morning which was usually chocolate muffins, brioches, bacon and hot chocolate. We went to the kids program until lunch, ate dinner with the kids and got back to our room around 11:00 each night.

Day 2: we went on a boat tour of the Vltava River that runs through Prague. I took quite a bit of pictures and videos of the trip. We were told of some history of Prague and it's floods and saw a giant metronome that was supposed to be a music school.

Day 3: I went with the kids group to the zoo. It was pretty far because it took 14 train stops and quite a few bus stops. That stank also with a hurt foot. But it was totally worth it. I took way more pictures of the animals than day 2.




After the zoo we ate pizza at Sbarro that considered itself "inspired by true Italian pizza". When it didn't get near to Italian pizza standard, I was very disappointed (I used almost half of the napkins just to soak up the extra grease). After that we split up: Emma and the girls went to a leader's house and me, Luca and our friend Isaac went to the kids' room to watch The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.

Day 4: we checked out of the hotel and began the ten hour drive back to Italy.  On the way we stopped at Flossenbürg Concentration Camp were Bonhoeffer was executed. We got caught in a thunderstorm and got soaking wet, but luckily we found shelter inside until the storm passed.  It was only a short stop there at the camp. While we were going back to the car the air was being filled with somber music because of the commemoration service that was being held for the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Flossenbürg.

We listened to two Chronicles of Narnia books on the way home. In Switzerland it was raining and cloudy. It was pretty scary when you're up in the mountains and you can barely see anything and at every turn there's a cliff. But thank the Lord who protected us and helped Dada the entire way to drive correctly. I slept for an hour or two and when I woke up it was midnight. But at least we were safely home.