I was reading a good friend of mine's blog the other day and he was talking about the importance of putting God in control of our plans, rather than always relying on our own plans. I think this is one of those ideas that sounds so simple but we rarely implement in our own lives. After reading his post, God demonstrated for me the power of sitting back and letting him plan things by leading me straight into the middle of a transformed medieval city - let me explain...

At the beginning of the summer, I had come up with a detailed plan of what cities I wanted to visit and which trains I would need to take to get to all of those places. It seemed like common sense to make sure that I actually had a place to sleep for the many nights ahead of me before my family arrived at the end of June.

Well turns out things didn't quite go according to my plans...

There were many times when my plans were changed or switched up - trying to find a place to stay last minute in Amsterdam around midnight, loving Switzerland so much that I canceled most of the other cities I had planned to travel to, and luckily finding a way to ride the Glacier Express because my Swiss time was extended. Now those change in plans meant that I arrived in Germany a day later than I had originally expected, which didn't seem like a big deal, turns out it worked largely in my favor though :)

So I arrived in Stuttgart on Friday, just in time to watch the Germany world cup match. Sadly they lost the game but it was still a crazy experience to hang outside with thousands of germans watching the game together. After strolling around Stuttgart for a little bit, I jumped on the train towards a small town called Reutlingen where I was staying with a good friend of mine from MSLS, Tilman. Tilman made an awesome dinner (and I am sufficiently caught up on any lack of butter I may have been experiencing due to traveling and a limited budget, butter, butter and more butter!) and then I managed to steal his internet for awhile to catch up on some work.

We still hadn't planned what we were going to do on Saturday but had been talking about going to see a castle for quite some time. Well at the last minute, Tilman realized that because my plans had changed and I had arrived two days later - I was actually just in time to see a yearly 'spectacle' in a small town called Horb, about an hour away. Turns out that every year the town re-enacts what the area and people used to look like back in the medieval time period and have actors re-enacting important charters that were signed and parades held throughout the town. For those Pennsylvanians out there, imagine the Renaissance Fair times 100, located in an authentic medieval german town, and with nearly every visitor dressed up as well - it was absolutely insane. There was jousting and knight fights, crazy medieval food, a bagpipe band that made the eurovision winners from Finland look pathetic, and so many random things to buy that looked like they were directly out of Hogwartz (the fact that everything was in german probably didn't help when it came to determining what those random things actually were).

As we were riding back to Reutlingen where I was going to stay the night, I just couldn't help but smile at the odds of me randomly pushing back my plans which resulted in the chance to go see Horb, a town I would never have known existed beforehand. Over the years as I travel more and more, I've got quite used to going with the flow and adapting plans as they happen - for me that is getting quite easy to do for traveling - but I need to try and apply that to other aspects of my life as well.

I like to know how things are going to, or supposed to, happen in life. Perhaps that is the control-freak part of me coming out and it is quite hard to tame down. But when we hand over our desires for how life should be run and give it to God, crazy things happen.

Well the craziness continues for my traveling and tonight I am sleeping in Fussen, Germany before heading down to Austria tomorrow to meet up with McLean and Matt. Today I went and saw Neuschwenstein, the famous german castle that Disney used as inspiration for the Cinderella castle in Florida. It was quite impressive and the first completely touristy thing I've done all trip, but it was definitely worth it! The castle itself is massive, but only 16 rooms inside have been finished because the king died unexpectedly and all construction stopped. As has been the story throughout this trip so far, it continued to rain all day but it made for some cool views as the clouds engulfed the castle on top of the hill. Now it is Sunday night and I am sleeping in a hostel and happy to have a hot shower and comfy bed to sleep in for the night. Onto Austria in the morning!