Santa Claus

What better way to celebrate the season than with a visit to Santa Claus, Indiana?

I saved this portion of my summer road trip to publish this week. The town must look quite magical during the Christmas holiday, so my sunny photos might not do it justice.

There are several town websites to explore.
This one doesn’t have many photos: Santa Claus IN.
This site has some history: History.
a HA! This site has a photo gallery: Celebration, but not many show a winter wonderland.
I guess I’ll have to get back there some December and see if it looks more like the North Pole.

View of a Coaster

There is an amusement park there, but I only peered in from the cache location outside.

Entering the town:

One of the two shopping centers, Kringle Place:

The post office, where they must receive many wonderful letters from around the world:

Town Hall:

… and the man, the icon, the Santa:

May your Christmas and New Year celebrations be filled with the magic of the season and many wonderful memories for years to come.

Germany and the magic of Christmas

Welcome to 2009, and a new year of geoblogs, geopix, and geoadventures!

Back in 1977, I was an AFS exchange student in Northern Germany, and I decided to revisit the family again this year for Christmas. I’ve stayed in touch, especially when I lived and worked in Germany about 15 years ago. Of course, this trip presented an opportunity to find my first caches in Europe, and I even got to three different countries!

I landed in Frankfurt and was met by my exchange sister, Gerlinde, who helped me find my first cache in the Vaterland:
Goethes Vater – Jugendkulturkirche St. Peter

She’s since become a geocacher herself, and went and bought a Nüvi for it!

My first errand upon arrival:

Old Opera House, Frankfurt

New building in Frankfurt – funky hole in it! Is it art?

Things to see in Frankfurt:

Authentic cuisine in Frankfurt:

Kaffeehaus

We spent two nights with her friend, Annagret, and their family in Rheda-Wiedenbrück. There’s a cache in these old millwheels:
Neue Mühle

The town’s manger scene had real sheep!

The town square had an oversized Christmas decoration:

This is the main street:

Houses dating from 1609:

The town is on a canal:

Speaking of canals, we found one near the Kiel canal:

There’s a cache up this hill:
Die zwei Berge

with this view:

We found a cache in Eutin that was installed in the armrest of a public bench, but it had been put back in wrong, and we couldn’t retrieve it, even with Gerlinde’s handy tool set:
De jure

This is a cache hide in Burg am Fehmarn:
Grössenwahn??

It’s next door to this church:

and around the corner from these chickens:

Other caches we found in Germany:
Forelle – Fische & Schiffe
Stoer-Faktoren
Wallenstein Eiche
Droped! Red12
Itzehoer Denkmäler – Eisenbahn

On Christmas Eve, we went to the North Pole. It’s only a few miles from where I visted – who knew?
Nordpol

There a certain magic to being in Germany for Christmas. There’s not so much commercialism, and the mood is much more relaxed. Every town has a Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas market)

where you can enjoy a glass of Glühwein (hot mulled wine)

Next stop…. Denmark! … and the cache placed just for me!