Roman Fortress Saalburg

On the day we went to Wehrheim, we also stopped by an old Roman Fort called the Saalburg for a couple hours.Traces of the fort date back about 2000 years and it was a part of a huge wall that stretched across most of Germany.We felt it appropriate to reenact a possible battle scene. Although it may look like Karen is throwing a spear directly into the wall there is actually a large gap. So don’t worry about the spear bouncing back at her!There were several buildings inside the fort, each of them with different museums that contained old Roman archaeological finds. These two pretty loaves of bread were actually found in Pompeii, still preserved from the Volcano. Wow.Elora was really excited to look inside the well.The grounds inside the fort were very extensive and very beautiful. It probably didn’t look that pretty 1500 years ago…Elora loved running around and exploring everything.Here is Ollie and Mommy posing together inside of the old ruins of a large Roman bath. The different rooms were composed of a warm bath, cold bath, and a changing room.Oliver was also happy to crawl around as you can see.Here are a couple of baking ovens. We’re thinking about building one of these in our backyard back home. We actually ate pizza at a place that cooked the pizza in a wood burning oven just like this.This tree branch was just begging for someone to lean up against it and look very chummy. Elora enjoyed running around inside the museum and hitting the old relics with her stick. Notice that we took a picture -before- telling her not to hit the 1000 year old archaeological find. It lasted that long, it can withstand a 3 year old right? Actually she never hit it, she was just waving her stick dangerously close. But she was very interested to learn that this was an old stake that was used to stake down the “crane” used in constructing the large walls.Cute!Elora loves picking up sticks, pine cones, rocks, and feathers. She carried this handful around with her when we saw a place inside the fort selling ice cream cones for 1 euro. So we bought her a cone and told her to put her sticks in the bush while she ate it. Elora interpreted this as “jam all the sticks directly into the bush” as you can see in the photo with the sticks suspended in the neatly trimmed hedge above her head. You’ll be interested to note this was her 2nd ice cream cone ever, and both times she ate them all without spilling a drop. The only mess was on her face.We finally got a good family picture! Actually this production involved using photoshop to cut and paste one person who originally wasn’t looking at the camera. Can you guess who got edited into this picture?