Ludwigsburg Castle and Grounds

Yesterday I went to the Ludwigsburg Castle grounds.  So basically I saw the outside of the castle and walked around the grounds taking lots of pictures.  I went with someone from my ward here.  Ludwigsburg is just north of Stuttgart so it wasn't to long of travel time from Weiler Zum Stein.  The day was a bit cloudy and rainy at first but the day ended up being really nice.

This is the picture I got of the castle first thing that morning when we got there.

This is a picture I got of it when we were leaving.  Don't mind the random strangers they just happened to be walking up at the time so they ended up in the picture.  And these pictures are only the front view of this place.

This here is a side view of the castle and there is still more through the arches and some on the right and left of this picture.  But the whole reason that we went was to view the pumpkin art.  Which was really cool.

This is what is was called.  I thought all the pumpkin art had to do something with fairy tales but I just looked up what the word Kürbismeer means Kürbis means pumpkin which I knew and meer means sea.  So as I look back on what these words mean and I can see that all the pumpkin art is from the sea which it really is now that I think about it.  Here are some pictures.

 

This was being used as a fountain as we came to the pumpkins and I thought it was really cool.

 

 This was a surfer.

This one I thought was cool because I didn't know about pumpkins that grew long and skinny like that.

This was a mermaid.

A fisherman

A blue whale

This was one of three dolphins.

 This is an octopus.

 A seahorse.

A pirate on a deserted island.

This was only one of four walls that was covered in different pumpkins.  They were labeled by name as well as by what part of the world you would most commonly see these pumpkins growing.  These pictures are not all of the pumpkin art but most of it.  Next, we went to the Märchengarten.  Märchen means fairytale and garten means garden.  This place was awesome.  They had different things from different fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen and others.

 This is the Hansel and Gretel house and when you go up to the gate and turn the handle this is what happens:

The wicked witch lady from the fairytale and says something (it was in German so I don't know what she said).

This they called Ali Babba, but it looked like Aladdin to me.  We went into a house and they had different rooms.  This was only one of the rooms but it was pretty cool.

Little Red Riding Hood

Rumpelstiltskin

Rupunzel, you had to ask her to let down her hair when you got on the other side of the tower.  This tower I believe is part of the old castle wall and on the inside was sleeping beauty and you get to walk down the old spiral staircase on the inside of the tower which is pretty cool.  With all the displays you had to pull, crank, push, talk, step, and many other things to get them to do what they were supposed to do.
These are just a few of the ones that were here some I got a picture of and some I did not.  These gardens have been around for 50 years and they were displaying some of the older machines that they had to make all these things work correctly.  It was really cool to see all of this.  We also went to Stuttgart but just walked around and saw the old Stuttgart castle as well.