For day two of our trip to Fredericksburg in central Texas, we decided to take it a bit easy and wait for the weather to warm up a bit more before pursuing further adventures on our 2-wheeled machines.  This also gave us a chance to catch up with the wives and see some of the cultural offerings of Fredericksburg.

After a slow start to the morning, we finally are out the door around 10am or so to head to the Nimitz World War II museum.  If you have never been, I highly encourage you to go.  The museum alone is worth the trip to Fredericksburg.  The museum is actually an old hotel that has since been added onto and converted to support the thousands and thousands of visitors that go through the museum each year.  Here is a link that will take you to the website for the museum so that you can get a sense of what it looks like from the outside.  http://www.pacificwarmuseum.org/index.asp

Once you go into the museum and start looking around, you quickly realize this is something special.  The hotel section of the museum is just part of what is available.  There is an entire courtyard with plaques commemorating ships, officers and a special section for each of the presidents that served in WWII.  Here are a couple of pictures of what you find outside.

Once we were finished with the courtyard, we made our way into the second building.  This is where the real surprise came.  In this second building you will find multiple airplanes as well as tanks, guns, jeeps and even a submarine from WWII.  It is just amazing.  About the best advice I can give someone planning on going to the museum is go early and plan to be there awhile.  There is so much to see that we were not able to get through all of it.  You could definitely spend the entire day looking at what the museum has to offer.

After the museum, we headed over to Auslander for lunch.  Authentic German food which was very good.  I had the pepper sausage and sauerkraut.  Of course my stomach didn’t like it later, but my tongue was happy with it at the time.  German beer was excellent and after a late lunch, we headed back to the house.  At least the guys did.  The girls were off to go shopping.

At home, we assembled our gear and went for a quick ride on the bikes just so that we could say we rode every day.  As you can tell from the pictures above, the weather was perfect and being out in the sun on the bike was much wanted after the dark, drizzly day we encountered coming down to Fredericksburg.

We took a leisurely jaunt up 965 towards the Enchanted Rock and then on over to 16.  From there we turned south, did the Willow City Loop and back to 16.  Turned north to go back up to 965 and took that the other direction towards Fredericksburg.  We stopped in at Enchanted Rock and took a few pictures.  Yes, those are people standing way up there on top.  We decided not to venture that far as we were more anxious to get back to riding.  The rock is apparently a big piece of granite coming up out of the middle of Texas and as it comes up, it continues to slough off pieces of itself.  Very strange to see and reminds me of the big rock in Georgia – Stone Mountain – that basically does the same thing.  Here’s a picture of Enchanted Rock.

After visiting the rock, we finally made our way back to Fredericksburg.  Was a great day seeing the sights.