Cologne and Bonn...

Got up, ate breakfast at our hotel and headed for Cologne.  It was a 2 hour drive.  (Luckily we didn't have to pack up... we are actually staying in our hotel for TWO nights instead of one!)  We saw the Cologne Cathedral today.  It was  pretty impressive with it's Gothic architecture and size!  It was badly damaged in the war, but was completely rebuilt.  It was built or rather, finished being built in 1880.  We went inside and it had beautiful stained glass windows. We walked around the square in the shopping area but I didn't find anything I couldn't live without!  We then drove the 20 minutes to Bonn and saw the house where Beethoven was born and went through the museum there.  It was pretty interesting, but everything was in German, so it  was hard to read the information on all the cards...still very interesting though.  We drove back to our hotel after that-- a 1 1/2 hour drive, but it felt like a lot longer than that!  We ate a nice dinner near our hotel-- a very German dinner.  I had the veal schnitzel, Robin the chicken with mango and not sure what Allison had-- it was schnitzel though.  Mine had a chunky mushroom sauce on top.  It was good, just too much!  We were so hungry but it was too much food.  It was super heavy and the portion was huge-- none of us could finish our dinner!  We got in much earlier to our hotel tonight.  I'm ready for a good night's sleep!!  We weren't at our hotel for very long, when we got a delivery from "Helga"!  It was from Bill and the girls!  It was a fruit and cheese platter with bread and a yogurt dessert smoothie of some sort.  A sweet note accompanied it.  Our cute friend "Helga" was so excited to deliver it and had a huge smile on her face when I answered our door.  She is so cute and so eager to please us!  I should've taken a picture of her at our door with everything... didn't think about it.  What a great way to end another fun day in Germany!  Too bad we were so full that we couldn't really enjoy the platter of food!  We did enjoy a couple of games of Shanghai though.