A Weekend Excursion to Trier

We took advantage of a free Monday to spend Sunday and Monday in Germany's oldest city - Trier. It sits on the Mosel River, near the border of Germany and Luxemburg, so it is a perfect destination to try local wines and French influenced cuisine along with seeing the historical sites. As we enjoyed the Sunday morning train ride, we were quite surprised to pass a small town named Bitburg. Little did we know that we would be so close to the home of Bitburger beer. Once in Trier, we found a great place for lunch (including a tasty Bitburger - Bitte ein Bit) and toured the city by foot. The highlight of the afternoon was a trip to the Dom, where amazingly some of our photos actually look artistic.
Check out the organ in the Dom - it looks like the Star Wars Landspeeder (or so Chris says - I obviously have no idea what he is talking about).
Across from the Dom we tried some of the great Rieslings of the area, and for the first time, I actually found white wine quite tasty.
Monday morning we started with a delicious and large breakfast buffet. We were staying in a very nice large hotel in the middle of town with upwards to 100 rooms - but we think there may have been one other guest in the entire hotel (and this is only because we saw that another room had been cleaned, not because we encountered any small children in pig-masks). It was all a tad bit odd. True it was a Sunday night, but still, you would expect a hotel of that size and location to have some of the many tourists we saw staying there. After breakfast we did some birthday shopping for Chris and climbed up the tower of the Porta Nigra - the imposing 2nd-Century gate that was part of the mile long Roman wall. As you might guess we had some great views of the city.
We appreciated the uneventful train ride home, arriving back in Köln on schedule. For more pictures of the trip, you can look at our Trier Photo Album.