When we travel, I try to remember to plan in some free time. I’ve found that two “on” days (days with fixed plans and schedules and activities for which the kids have to “behave”, or travel days) followed by one “off” day is about right.

An off day doesn’t have to be a lazy day or a sit-around-and-do-nothing day, though. It just means we won’t make any concrete plans, we’ll sleep as late as we like, we’ll rest for at least part of the day and we don’t have anything we’re trying to accomplish. Today was an “off” day, so we slept in, had a leisurely morning, and then went for a drive with no particular purpose.

We drove back to a beautiful lake, called Plansee, that we saw the other day on our way in to town, and B and I got out to explore (Liam was napping so we let him rest). After that, we got in the car and just started to drive. We have a GPS, so we know we can always get home, so we just drove and let ourselves get lost.

Along the way, Liam woke up, we drove to Germany, and we started seeing signs for Schloss Linderhof, another of King Ludwig’s castles. We decided to go check it out.

It was beautiful, very elegant, very wooded, and very Bavarian looking. After tormenting the boys (and ourselves) yesterday with the tour of Neuschwanstein, we opted to skip the tour, and just wandered around the grounds. We didn’t last long, but that’s ok — that’s part of having a quiet day.

We finished our visit with lunch and ice cream. The boys had their ice cream popsicles while Dan & I finished our lunch, and then we had our own cones. This was a bad idea. Not only did our kids eat half our ice cream (after having their own) but we looked like the worst parents EVER — eating our ice cream cones while our children pathetically asked for “just a bite”. Ah, well. It was a good day anyway.