Guten Tag and Willkommen to a new year filled with a lot of excitement coming in the next few months! However, I have even more exciting news from December – we were finally able to go to Deutschland and I was able to share all of my favorite places and spaces with Garrett! 

So, in a very condensed version, I’m going to share everything that we did and where we went over the next few weeks, with a little bit of wedding planning fun in between. Instead of breaking our trip down by day (we were there for a while), I’m going to divide it into the three cities that we spent the most time in – Heidelberg (my former home), Frankfurt and Cologne! 

So up first, I’m going to share all about Heidelberg!

As many of you know, I lived in Heidelberg in 2016 and it’s the birthplace of this online diary, so it felt very surreal to go back to the place that started it all. We arrived in Heidelberg on December 15 and stayed at the same hotel every night – if you’re in Heidel any time soon, I highly recommend the Heidelberg Marriott! They were super helpful with us figuring out all of the COVID-19 regulations and directing us in the best way possible. 

So…for the good stuff…

December 15 

When we arrived in Heidelberg, we dropped our stuff off at our hotel and immediately went to an apotheke to get our CDC Vaccination Cards translated to a EU one – we then uploaded them into CovPass so that we could shop, see and eat wherever we want! It was super easy and definitely necessary.

We then went to the Heidelberg Wine Market, which was a condensed version of the Christmas Market since it was shut down due to COVID-19. After enjoying our first mug of Gluhwein, we went to one of my favorite restaurants, Schnitzelhaus! I had my favorite schnitzel there and as we were super jet lagged, we went back to the hotel and had an early evening watching movies and sleeping early. 

December 17

Obviously, there’s a jump in days, but that’s because we went to Frankfurt and we’ll get to that later, wink wink. But, on Friday we spent the day back in Heidelberg. I took Garrett to my favorite restaurant for breakfast – Schafheutle – that I ate at pretty much every morning when I was at university. We had Irish coffees and lots of pastries and lived our best brunch life. 

After breakfast, I took Garrett up to the house that I lived at in 2016.

We then went up to Schloss Heidelberg for a castle tour and morning of exploring. The castle was just as stunning as I could recall and I loved showing G around the grounds where I used to run and drink wine in. 

We bought some paintings and walked through some stores before going to dinner at Hans im Glück. 

December 18

The following morning, we grabbed a quick breakfast at Kamps (all praise the puddingbrezel) and gathered some pretzel rolls, meats and gruyere for our hike up to Philosophenweg and Thingstätte. 

We hiked all the way up, had a charming little picnic and then went home. This typically takes all day, or a good chunk of it, so if you ever plan to make the trek, budget your time accordingly. Following the hike, we went back to the hotel to freshen up and had an amazing dinner at Gallo Nero, an incredible Italian restaurant that I had never been to! 

Gallo Nero is definitely the find of the trip for us!

December 21

This was our last day in Heidelberg and probably my favorite because my sweet Margaux (who I met and lived with in Heidelberg) drove down from Cologne and surprised me there! We went back to the Wine Market for Glühwein and had dinner at Kulturbrauerei Heidelberg before going back to the hotel to pack. 

It was the most incredible night that I was so surprised by and so grateful to forever have in the memories! Being back in my favorite home with my favorite guy and best friend was something that I don’t think I’ll ever recover from.

I could obviously talk forever about our time in Heidelberg, but there’s not enough time in the day or pages on the website for us to go into all of the good stuff! And stay tuned, because there’s more to go into when it comes to Frankfurt and Cologne!