Drachenhole and the Nature Adventure Path, Furth im Wald, Germany

Natalie had a few fun trips planned with the Girl Scouts this spring, and one of them was to see the world's largest walking robot (superlative!) followed by a nature hike so I quickly volunteered for that adventure!  If there's a superlative involved, I'm there!

But first... an Easter photo at church!

And second, a pic of my little buddy up at bat in his baseball game!

The group took a quick group picture at our first stop, the Drachenhohle.  

The Drachenhohle is a small, but really cool little stop.  It contains the largest walking robot in the world!  Superlative!

There's a little museum that shows you the history of the Dragon - we got a big kick out of this photo from 1900.  You're not fooling anyone!

Every year they put on a big production at the Dragon Slaying Festival, which they've been doing since 1590!  In the play, the knight must save his wife from the fire breathing dragon.

Suuuuuper creepy.

Cutie girls with the dragon, who is interestingly named Traddino (but he's not a dinosaur!)  This dragon has a wingspan of 12 meters and he's 15 and a half meters long!

Traddino was "born" in 2006 (although this is his predecessor and my kid) and was certified by Guinness as the largest walking robot in the world!

The best part was that he was soft.  I kind of wanted to jump up there and fly away on him, but I'm not a Targaryan, so he probably would have just burned me alive.

Next up, we drove closer to the nature path and enjoyed a picnic lunch.  The girls in my car (Aili, Natalie and Lily) ate on a log outside of my car.  For peace and quiet, I ate INSIDE of my car.

Our next stop was a beautiful hike at the Nature Adventure Path!

The Wildgarten had a bit of a flooding problem back in 2010!  But really, isn't this the best use of a floodplain?  A hiking trail!

Helpful little maps tell you which direction to go and what you can see along the way.

The first big stop was the pond you could view from under the water.  You can see some fish, but it's pretty murkey.

There's also a bunch of random metal statues of animals all around.

They have a little area where they raise tadpoles into frogs.

You can then follow the trails through the forest - this particular section bounced as you walked across it.  The kids had fun tossing us around!

The trail is very easy and almost entirely flat as it's solidly in a floodplain.

Hello there little frog! I see you spying on me!

The area surrounding the floodplain is hilly and beautiful.

Did you do a no rise certification on this structure over the stream?

OMG y'all.  I was SO excited when I saw this. I mean, other than the fact that they put a structure DIRECTLY OVER THE RIVER.  But look!  It's on pilings! And the pilings were EFFECTIVE against the flooding that happened in 2010!  The structure didn't flood!

The little hut, as it stands today.

Little cuties hanging out in the trees.

Agh, it's just so pretty!  I'm so happy to finally see green again!

The little ones found a big swing near a little hut and everyone took turns swinging.

Meanwhile, Mommy took a break and enjoyed the scenery.

Michele and I were missing our friend Justine, so we sent her this selfie of us with Pennie.

Continuing on the trail, we spotted a wooley mammouth made of... sticks?

Honestly, this trail kept getting more weird, the farther we went.  Here, let's put a Grim Reaper statue right here in the middle of the stream.  Sure.

And then we'll randomly have a fake dinosaur skeleton waaaaay in the back.

And next to said fake dinosaur skeleton, we'll throw a fake skull on a post right in the middle of the stream, too.

As we made our way around the trail, we came across a really cool tree house that the girls all went in.  It was called, "A Castle in the Air" and it was "in keeping with our philosophy, 'Courage to Wilderness' from oak and larch as grown."

We had the girls line up and snapped a quick pic of all of them.

Whoa!!!  As we were about to leave, we walked past this super old tree that had fallen in a (somewhat) recent storm.  How big must this tree have been?

Before we left, I had Michele snap a pic of me and my girl.  Notice the forecast called for rain all day.  And so we wore layers and rain jackets and snow boots (because hiking in rain boots would suck.)  And of course it was sunny nearly the whole day.  Germany with it's crazy weather!!!

Until next time, Drachenhole and the Nature Adventure Path!

Dino Park, Denkendorf, Germany

Natalie had a FUN trip to Therme Erding (in Munich) planned for today with her Girl Scout troop and the weather was really beautiful, so we decided to take advantage of the sunshine and warm weather and drive down to the little town of Denkendorf, which is just north of Ingolstadt and check out Dino Park!  Grant really wanted to go, and he had been there before on a school trip.  So we thought, why not have a fun day with our little buddy?

Since we got there around noon, we ate some lunch first (mmmm, currywurst!) and then set out to explore the dinosaurs.  Or the kraken, coming out of a snail shell!

Before you enter the land of the dinosaurs, you got to see a timeline of the world, which gave you a good sense of scale for how long the world has been around, and how very little time humans have existed.

The T-Rex of the sea (Dunkleosteus terrelli) could be 9 meters if fully grown.  Fish were the oldest animals on the earth that had bones.

The Eryops megacephalus was a type of frog or newt that lived millions of years ago in Europe and North America.

One cool thing the park had was a map of the world as it looked during the time period you were walking through.  On the map, it showed you where the location of the Dino Park was during that time period! SO cool!  At this point, 300 million years ago, the Dinosaur Park would have been much closer to the equator!

What a T-Rex would have looked like a month after its death.

Grant with the Plateosaurus Engelhardti.  This guy (not Grant) was one of the first long necked dinosaurs.  One of these was found in 1834 right here in Bavaria - in Heroldsberg, which is about 40 minutes from our house.  It was the first dinosaur found in Germany and since then, about 100 of this type of dinosaur have been found in Germany and Switzerland.

Grant, a dinosaur is about to eat you!

Here little fella.  Have some snacks.

This thing was super cool.  At one point, this guy was all over the place (like modern birds are today.)  Pterodactyls, when on the ground would position their wing under their elbow vertically, so that they could use their three short front fingers for scraping and climbing. Weirdly... the sign near it said that only recently they had discovered that their babies hatched from eggs.

They looked kind of like this when they stood.

DON'T EAT MY BABY!

(NO WORDS)

First, Grant was super excited that this was Diplodocus.  This plant eater was 30 meters from nose to the end of his tail... but Grant seemed only interested in the spot from where he pooped. Little boys, ugh!

I spy you through the trees, Diplodocus.

Brachiosaurus wasn't as big as the Brontosaurus length wise, but was much taller, kind of like a giraffe.

Todd loves anything that is taller than he is.

My usual view when looking up at Todd, only this Brachiosaurus is much taller.  And an airplane is about to hit his skull.  Or at least that's what I see from way down here.

The best part of this park is that about halfway through it, there's a delightful biergarten where you can take a break for some ice cream or a beer.  I love this messy kid.

Meanwhile, Todd and I did this.  (Remember when we went to Weltenburger Abbey?)

Hello there Mr. Croco.  I don't even care if you aren't a Croco. I'm gonna call you that because I love Crocos so much.

A mama and her baby.

Good news.  The egg was always first!  But were they?  Really?

Speaking of eggs... Dino babies are the cutest!

Hard shell, soft core.  Oh.  I meant the dinosaur, but that applies to Grant, too!  Euoplocephaus tutus had a big shell of armor, but he was a peaceful vegetarian. His back was hard armor, but his belly was super soft.  So when a predator tried to attack, he dropped to the ground to protect that cute belly.  The kid also has a cute belly.

Daddy and Grant with a Triceratops.  He seems friendly, despite the three horns that should have (and often did) crushed any T-Rex in the area.

But to me, the Triceratops was a sweet baby.

Baby Triceratops (or "three horned face") and Baby Bailey were also friendly!  Unless they were hungry!

Whoa that's a little scary!  (This is me when my kids make me mad, true story!)

But the T-Rex is the big daddy of them all.  The word Dinosaur is a combination of two Greek words:  Deions (meaning terrible) and sauros (meaning lizard.)  This one qualifies for that naming, especially since the word "Rex" means "king."  He was the king of the dinosaurs.

They had these great little signs with the actual meaning of the dinosaur names.

Toward the end of the path, you approach the end of the dinosaurs.  The dinosaurs had lived on Earth for 150 million years (WAY more than humans), and at the end of the Cretaceous period, a 10 km wide meteorite hit the Yucatan peninsula, decimating the dinosaurs and leaving a 180 km hole in the earth. But this gave rise to the mammals at the beginning of the Cenozoic era.  Birds are the only
animals descended from dinosaurs that survived this big blast.

This is a Mongolian Werewolf, and I don't even know if this is a real thing but it was one of the first animals to evolve after the extinction of the dinosaurs.  His closest living relative is a hippo, whose closest living relative is the whale.

Grant and a relative/ancestor of the rhinoceros. He's a Paraceratherium transouralicum and he's the biggest mammal ever to live on land (at this point of course!)

He's a type of this elephant (the Platybelodon danovi), although that's hard to believe.  The best part is the little kid seemingly giving this monster animal the middle finger. This guy lived about 10 million years ago.

The last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago, and woolly mammoths became extinct just before that, about 12,000 years ago.

It's like a hairy, large tusked elephant!

Grant, as a Neandertal.  There's a little sign next to this that says, "Human blood is all one color."

Primordial Earth was a sauna, which led to a rain storm that lasted thousands of years and filled the oceans.

This is what primordial earth looked like 4.6 billion years ago (but of course, it was liquid and hot!)

This 70 million year old recreation of the "D-Rex of the skies" is based off of bones that were found in Romania-- so they named him Dracula!  His wingspan was about 14 meters (or 46 feet) and he was the largest flying creature ever!

In this little museum, you can touch the REAL bones of a T-Rex!

The main attraction though is ROCKY!  This is a complete and intact REAL T-Rex skeleton that was found in South Dakota.  It's the ONLY original skeleton of a half-grown (aka: teenage) Tyrannosaurus Rex in the whole world!

It's estimated that Rocky is between 66-68 million years old.  He's about 30 feet long and was discovered in 1998.

To put it in perspective, Rocky is the one in the middle and the larger shadow T-Rex is a full grown dinosaur.

In total, we spent about 3-4 hours checking out the dinos, and really had a fun time!  Until next time, Dino Park!