Frankenmuth

Matt was on vacation last week, so we took a little trip to Frankenmuth, home to both Bronner's-the world's largest CHRISTmas store and Zehnder's-with the world famous chicken dinners. The trip turned out to be rather exciting, so here it is:

First, we arrive in Frankenmuth with little fanfare. We checked into our hotel and headed to Bronner's to experience all it's holiday glory and to see Santa Claus. The line, which was actually quite short, featured about a million distractions for the kids. Here is Annie taking advantage of one of them:

And then it was time to see the big guy himself. Matt and I braced ourselves...

And here it is, perhaps the most perfect Santa picture of all time!

Kate really only cried briefly and spent the rest of the time just looking very suspicious. Annie quickly stated what she'd like (a princess piano, of course) and what Kate would like (her own chair in pink). The girls got free ornaments and everyone was happy!

Bronner's is pretty amazing and completely gigantic. We didn't even make it through the whole store. Kate lost interest. Outside the store, there were tons of decorations and Annie (I may have influenced her slightly)  made sure that we stopped at each one to take a picture.

Annie and the giant Santa

The girls with the giant snowman

Annie leading an Arctic expedition. (She posed like that all on her own).

Annie loves penguins.

After all that excitement, we headed to Zehnder's restaurant (we also stayed at their hotel, but they are about a mile away from each other). Everything was going fine until we realized that our car refused to go faster than 24 miles per hour. Frankenmuth is a really small town, so it wasn't a huge deal on the way to the restaurant, but Matt and I both knew that we were in trouble. We ignored that and continued on.

So we enjoyed a world famous chicken dinner. It was incredibly good. Matt, Kate and I loved it. Annie had macaroni and cheese. While we waited for the food, Kate played a rousing game of peek-a-boo with the table linen. She has really good manners. :)

The spots on the tablecloth were from Kate. Zehnder's was very clean and served tons of great food.

We drove at a leisurely 24 mph back to the hotel where the girls were very cute despite their parents' frantic calls to their parents to determine what could be done about the car. My very nice Uncle Jim gave us some advice, and we promptly all passed out from walking around a huge Christmas store and eating a huge Bavarian chicken dinner.

(Callista, I really liked that sweater :) Thanks for sharing your secrets.)