The Burke Family: Rudesheim

What do you get when you add a German Christmas market, your bestest friends, no kiddos and kinderpunch? A great day!! Last Thursday Sean and I had our first date in over 6 months as we traveled to the quaint town of Rudesheim along the Rhine River with the infamous Turner's. We love those guys!! We left around lunch time and traveled the nearly hour drive in the comforts of Dennis' cool Volvo talking and catching up. No Disney movie playing in the backround, no snacks being passed around, no fighting, no whining. Pure bliss. It was a bit chilly, but who cared!! We were together in a gorgeous Christmas market with endless supplies of kinderpunch and hot apple cider. The Germans make a warm alcoholic beverage called gluhwein that is quite popular at these markets. The vendors couldn't understand why grown adults would ask for the nonalcoholic version of their popular drink, but we were goofy and silly on our own, no alcohol needed to add to our crazy behavior.
Here we are:

And here are the coolest people with their kinderpunch in hand:

Christy and I found humor in the fact that there was a giant Santa statue right outside the Torture Museum. Maybe Santa had to put himself on the Naughty List for drinking too much gluhwein and driving a sled at the same time:

There is this amazingly cool little street that reminds us of Diagon Alley in Harry Potter. There are old, like hundreds of years old, buildings on each side of this narrow little road along a cobblestone pathway. We found some fun stores along the way to duck inside of and shop for a few minutes while we warmed up.

What happens when you ask some people to take a picture you that have had a little too much gluhwein? One of them insists on being in the picture with you. This guy is supposedly a local German celebrity who gives wine tasting tours. He spent a few minutes trying to convince us that we should take one of his tours. Maybe he couldn't tell that our cups weren't reeking with alcoholic beverages so he kept asking us. We were finally able to shake him.

I had to take a picture of this store's front window. This is a total Jaxon store. He would have spent the whole time in this store had he been with us. It was in this store that I found a cool Roman/Greek chess set for him for Christmas.