Ice Skating and Our Christmas Trip

Last night Brian and I ventured out into the cold wintry weather to go ice skating. Bonn has 2 different open air ice skating rinks in the city. Both are fully decorated with Christmas lights and play US and German Christmas carols. We skated for about an hour and although I'm a horrible ice skater, I had a great time. Bonn continues to put me in the Christmas mood, especially now that Brian and I are both on break. We're both done with work and class until January...

We decided to hold off on travel until Marie and Nick arrive in 6 days. Our Christmas trip will be a lot of traveling, but is going to be so much fun! We begin our trip by picking Marie and Nick up in Amsterdam on Christmas day. We're planning (if Marie and Nick aren't too exhausted) to walk around the city for a short time (everything will be closed) then head back to Bonn. On our way back, we're going to stop at Asperen, Netherlands.


A little Van Asperen history:
I don't know much about my family heritage, but I do know that when my ancestors came to America, they took the last name of the village they came from..."Asperen" Van in Dutch means from, so we apparently took the name "from Asperen" which is "Van Asperen". Asperen was a former municipality in Zuid-Holland; since 1 Jan 1986 it is part of Lingewaal municipality in Gelderland province. It was part of the region known as "Vijf-herenlanden". To the right is the Asperen flag. The colors are from the old Asperen arms. The Asperen arms are for the original family which settled in Asperen, the Van Arkel's. Supposedly, the family was guided to this tribal land by a swan which is where they settled. The ship represents the location of the village on the Linge River.


That's about all I've researched about my family history, but it should be exciting to see...we'll return to Bonn in the late afternoon and have a nice Christmas dinner. On the 26th we're going to spend the day in Cologne. We leave on the 27th for Brussels, Belgium. We spend 2 nights there before heading to Paris, France on the 29th. We will do some great sight-seeing and leave on New Year's Eve for Dublin, Ireland. We'll bring in the New Year in style with Irish music and our own pub crawl. We're meeting some of our friends in Dublin as well. We fly into Dusseldorf, Germany on January 2nd and plan to spend a few hours there if we're not too exhausted. We'll have a relaxing night back in Bonn before driving to Switzerland on the 3rd. Our drive will be through southern Germany, Austria, and the smallest German speaking country in the world: Liechtenstein. We'll be in Savognin, Switzerland for 3 days and will ski down the Swiss Alps (I'm so nervous). We're staying in a winter sports city so there will be everything from skiing to curling. We head back to Bonn on January 6th. Marie and Nick leave on the 7th. We will all probably be so exhausted, but it will be so much fun!