This was our family’s first Thanksgiving since moving abroad, so we decided to spend it together being thankful for each other and for the opportunity to live in Germany by visiting and spending the night in a castle. We headed to one of my son’s favorite places, Anholt Castle, where we spent the night in a corner room of the castle, had a delicious family dinner and explored the castle and its grounds. My son had his map in hand to lead the way, while my husband and I followed with our cameras. My husband captured images of the castle and the light refracting off of the moat, while I took pictures of my son as his imagination had him discovering, and dueling dragons in the moat.
Travelkins // Dragon Castle
My son, like most toddlers, loves to explore and to imaginative play – lately he has been spending most of his afternoons in our front yard slaying dragons with sticks. Because of my son’s love of castles and dragons, we took a drive to Königswinter, a city/summer resort on the right bank of the Rhine River in Germany. We went to Schloss Drachenburg, a mixture of a Villa-Mansion and Castle built atop a summit with an impressive view of Königswinter and the Rhine river. The summit also has the ruins of a castle built in the early 12th century, known to the locals as Drachenfels, because a cave in the hill is said to have sheltered a dragon (German=Drachen) that was slain by the hero Seigfried. My son may not be Seigfried, but once he was on the summit with his wooden sword there was no dragon that could get in his way from protecting his princess (a.k.a. mama).