Europe 2019: Technik Museum Speyer

Europe 2019

Technik Museum Speyer

After we finished up at the Hockenheimring we drove about 20 minutes to Speyer to visit the Technik Museum there. It turned out to be a great stop.

It's really just a big place with all kinds of mechanical and engineering items inside multiple buildings as well as outside on the grounds. It was a lot of fun, for everyone.

The first thing we did when we got there was have lunch. They have a couple of restaurants on site and the food wasn't bad...for German cuisine.

It took me a few seconds to teach Sam how to do the horns up.

We're actually walking on the wing of a 747 a few hundred feet in the air.

One thing I really liked about this place is that there didn't seem to be any employees around. You pay to get in and there are people in the restaurants and gift shops, but I didn't notice a single person anywhere else that looked like they worked there. Nobody was telling you what you could and couldn't do. 

Another thing I liked was that they had a lot of stuff for Samantha. There were random playgrounds and things she could ride or drive. It was very kid friendly, and we had the place pretty much to ourselves so she could go wild with whatever she wanted to play with.

The main reason I made sure to include this stop on our trip is that they have quite an extensive space exhibit, including a real Space Shuttle (albeit a Russian one). Branelle is a space geek, so she's always down for anything spacey. 

Spaceshuttle Buran

They even have a rather large and extensive gift shop.

They also have a lot of little carnival-type rides....unsupervised! You just put a Euro coin in and ride. I thought this was awesome. Here are a couple videos:

The Luna Loop

Nel and Sam rode the Luna Loop (because I exceeded the weight limit). They were just kind of slowly riding around thinking "no big deal" and then they hit a button or something and started flipping unexpectedly. Hilarious!

The Butterfly

I rode the Butterfly with Sam - combined weight made it ok. It was a lot of fun so we did it a few times. I just loved that they let you do all this stuff by yourself. That would never happen in the US.

After playing for a few hours we drove to Stuttgart and the Abacco Hotel. I picked it because it's right down the street from the Porsche Museum and it was car themed. It was nice, and had some rather interesting decor. 

The restaurant was pretty good.

They had a weird indoor pool, so we thought we'd let Samantha swim for a while before dinner. The hotel was cool, but they were really strange about towels. There weren't any in the pool area so I asked the front desk and they said I had to buy towels to use at the pool and then when I returned them they would refund my money! They made me buy four towels and then return them to the front desk of a rather nice hotel....WET....to get my money back. They were not about to get shafted by towel thieves at the Abacco.