The Bayreuth New Palace

Today the girls and I visited our very first castle. and WOW, are we in love. 

The girls loved seeing what a royal princess of the time might live like. Mike had to work today so we decided we would venture out on our own. Off we went about 1 hour away to the lovely town of Bayreuth. Since this was our first driving adventure, and I was alone with the kids, we only went to the one castle and then home early.
Getting there in the car went very smooth. Very beautiful rolling hill country all the way. Even though today was a gloomy rainy day we got a very good idea of what the castle was like. When we got there an English tour was hours off so we decided to just do a self guided tour.....in this tour I was able to take photos unnoticed. This is the first part of the castle. ( I will add the history of this castle further down). The girls were most surprised by the fact that the castle was freezing. They learned that this is to preserve to oil paintings and such. Also because it never had heat to begin with. Once they got past the fact that places like this are also not kept brightly lite and there was nothing scary about that, we went on our way touring the whole level undisturbed.

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The Chandeliers where amazing

there were literally 1000 of oil paintings in this place. Many were your "what you would expect" type.  Then there were some of women stabbing themselves in the heart--and then this one? Alexa was pretty disturbed by this image.

We even were sure to take time to dance in the grand ballroom!

Outside was gloomy today, but still they got the idea of the beauty it held.

Since we got there so early, we were not going to wait all afternoon to take the guided tour. One of the staff noticed how much we loved it and offered to take us on a free tour of the second part of the castle. This was made for the second wife and was more "modern". My absolute favorite area by far. Because she was so kind to offer and went "off script" to tell the girls all about a women's typical day at a castle....I did not push trying to take any photos. Here are a few I found online.

I love the history of these places. I could go on and on about all the interesting facts, but if you want to look it up for yourself this website does a better job then I could.

http://www.bayreuth-wilhelmine.de/englisch/n_palace/index.html

Two facts the girls took from today. ONE: even boys wore the large dresses as young children. TWO: We got to see a bath. It was a large ceramic bowl in a separate room. Apparently they very rarely bathed in that time period. They believed that if one bathed too often that the water would seep into their skin and bloat/drowned them to death. Instead they had many fleas and lice all over them. Instead they just powered themselves over and over again without washing off the powder layers.