Cologne

On our way back to Germany from Brussels, I fell asleep. I know that surprises all of you. :) Sometime during the drive, Steve pats my leg and says "Hey! We just entered the Netherlands." I think I said something like "cool." Then I fell back to sleep. If I was more coherent I would have taken a picture. That is what I get for sleeping. But that did make our count to 8 countries that we have been in during our time here. WOW! That is a lot of countries. I don't think either one of us had ever thought that we would travel to 8 different countries.

Anyway, we drove through the Netherlands to Cologne, Germany. Like I said before, there was supposedly a really cool chocolate factory here. As we drove in to the city, we were surprised at how pretty it was. (I don't know why we keep getting surprised over this. EVERYTHING is just beautiful here!)

We found a parking place and walk to the Schokoladen Museum.
Please ignore my face in this picture. I was tickling Josh trying to get him to smile and Steve took the picture before I was ready.

We were hoping this was going to be similar to chocolate factory in Broc. Zack had a really good time there. But this was more of a museum. It had a lot about cocoa beans and how they are harvested. They had movies of people cutting down cocoa bean trees. There was a lot to read and look at, which is not what a 2 year old wants to do. So we moved quickly through this part. There was one display about how chocolate is actually healthy for you. It had all sorts of reason why we should eat chocolate and how it effected the different parts of our body. But I am still wondering how healthy it really is. Why are my pants a little tighter after all the chocolate and chocolate waffles this weekend? Oh, I know, it must have been the fries!

The center part did have really cool machine making chocolate. We could go right up to them and look in. Zack liked running around and going up all the stairs to look at the chocolate.

This is the machine filling in chocolate molds.

This machine is making hollow molded chocolate. You know, like those hollow bunnies we can buy at Easter time. It was a really cool machine. The arms were moving constantly and in every direction. I never knew how they did this.
Very cool to see!

There was a model cocoa bean tree with chocolate running out the bottom. They dipped little waffle pieces in it and handed it out for a sample.Look at Josh eying Zack's chocolate. Lately, we have noticed how much Josh notices what Zack gets and he doesn't. We did give him a piece without chocolate. The chocolate was dripping all over, so we didn't want a mess. But he obviously knew the difference.

We finished up at the museum. It was a neat place, but we did like the Broc factory better. Zack liked this one a lot. He did not want to leave until we saw Willy Wonka. Some how we talked him in to leaving with out too much hassle.

On the way back to our car, Zack saw a little Merry-Go-Round with cars on it. Since t was only 1 euro, we let him ride. Every time he would circle back towards us, Josh would wave and say hi and Zack would wave back at him. It was the cutest thing.


These two can be each others best friends or each others worse enemies. I really like it when they play together. They can both giggle at each other for quite some time. I just love it!