Le Chaim!

Today, TLS and I drove to Bernkastel Kues for their annual wine festival. It is a town in the Mosel region which is home to one of Germany's largest and most famous wine festivals. The weather genie was nice to us today and we managed to have a beautiful, sunny day without a single drop of rain.

On the drive over, we got majorly lost because the road that our GPS told us to go on was closed and we struggled to find an alternate route. We ended up caravaning behind two other American cars and driving down a gravel road in a forest and parking 1.2 kilometers from the festival and having to walk the rest of the way. Fortunately, it was a beautiful walk.

See where that town is? That's how far we walked!

You can see some of the grapes on the vine in this picture. On the way down, I got intrigued and had to pick one and try it. It was delicious!

When we got into town the first thing that we did was get a glass of wine each, naturally.

There was a parade going on! Each winery has a float (a few had themes such as Dionysus or the Vikings) and there was a "Wine Princess" on top of each float. There were also bands playing traditional music of the region and dancers in regional costume doing the polka!

Throughout the parade, there were people walking behind each float with open bottles. If you got lucky, they would pour some of their wine into your glass to try! Definitely not something you would ever see in the States! TLS and I both said that this was one of the most incredible things that we have done together.

After the parade, it was time to move on to more wine and food.

I will leave it up to you to come up with a comment about all that sausage and the 1/2 meter weiners. Tee hee.

While we were walking around, we ran into one of the guys from TLS's squadron and his wife and ended up spending the rest of the day with them. We saw a street vendor that sold different wine and beer glasses that you could have etched in front of you to say what you wanted. TLS got a beer glass with sheafs of wheat on one side and his name on the other, and I got a pretty wine glass with my name on one side and flowers and grapes on the other. Unfortunately, try as hard as I could, I could not manage to photograph it at all. At this point, we had sampled a lot of wine, and I had put the camera away, but I did manage to take a few last pictures of the gorgeous scenery.