Day 7 - Stuttgart Palaces

Today was a free day.  Andi and I wanted to meet up with some friends from our sabbatical time in Stuttgart.  Also, I wanted to offer a side tour to any students interested in tagging along with us.  Amazingly, 17 of 22 wanted to go along!  So today we caught a 10:00 train to Ludwigsburg, a nearby city.  There are three nice palaces in Ludwigsburg, but we only planned to see two of them.  The third was smaller and much further away, difficult to get to by public transit / foot.

We started out in a nice wooded area.  This was a fenced forest where kings would go hunting for stocked deer.  Sometimes they would have the deer driven towards them so they would not have to work at all to hunt.  There was a small palace at the end of the park, Schloss Favorite.  We took a quick tour of the palace with a nice man guiding us around.

Next, we walked to the larger palace, the Ludwigsburg Residenz Schloss.  We had some time to kill so we walked around the extensive gardens for a bit.  They have cafes, bird enclosures, geometric gardens, fountains, fairy tale houses and other things around the palace ardents.  We started the tour at 1:30 but the tour took much longer than expected.  Everyone was very tired when we were done plus it started raining.  Despite this, I think they all had quite an experience for 10 Euros.

Andi and I had dinner with our friends at Paulaner.  Later, Claudia helped me acquire something I have desired for many years, a Stuttgarter Hofbräu Hefeweizen Glas!

Andi reports 8.1 miles, 31 floors, 18,200 steps.

Selected Pictures