Thursday, 14 July: Kassel

Frau Heller dropped us off at the train station after breakfast. She had been very kind to us and had gone out of her way for us.  It was just like having another mother.  We left in the morning for Kassel arriving around noon at the Kassel Wilhelmshöhe Train Station. We took tram 3 to Drusitel and then bus 22 to the Hercules Monument.  

The architecture was very romantic—the 19th century imagination of what a castle should be like.  The castle itself (which we did not see) apparently was built new but made to look as if it were old and decaying.  The water part was built on the top of a high hill.  A large octagonal base held a statue of Hercules.  Jagged rocks created both natural looking and structured looking water paths down the middle.  The water is turned on at 2:30 but we wanted to go to the art museum which was about ¾ of the way down before we caught our 4:15 train, so we chose to see the waterpath with only a little water rather than miss the art museum.  The art museum had pictures by many famous painters as well as names we didn’t know.  It had an entire room filled mostly with Rembrandt paintings.  Kristen’s favorite was the "Menagerie of the Land" by Roos which had a fairly large section in the top right of parrots including 2 Indian ringnecks at the very top.  

The monument was being restored because it had serious construction issues.  The Italians who designed it had not engineered it properly, and the stone it was made from weathered quickly. Plus the core which had been replaced in the1950s was rusting out.  

It was overcast and cool but not rainy today.

We then took tram 1 back to the station where we caught the 4:15 train to Mannheim.  The train was running 5 minutes late when it picked us up and was 12 minutes late by the time we arrived in Mannheim. On the train we sat at a table with a woman from Hannau who had been in Kassel on business and a man whose summer home was near Berlin who was going to Mannheim for his sister’s 80th birthday.   We missed the connection we had hoped to catch since it had left 4 minutes earlier and instead caught the 7:08 train to Neckargemünd, arriving around 7:38.  Annemarie was waiting for us.   It was very nice to see her.   She works at a home for retired missionaries on Lobbach.  After we dropped our stuff off, we went for a long walk along a field and into a forest, picking blackberries, apples, plums, and strawberries on the way.