After another delightful German breakfast, today’s bus trip took us finally to Wittenberg, the cradle of the Reformation. Again I couldn’t stay awake on the bus unfortunately. As we arrived at the hotel, Shannon give Sergei his gratuity for being an excellent driver all week.

We stored our luggage at the hotel and then walked over to the castle church, the same one where Martin Luther nailed the 95 theses to the door in 1517. The original door is of course long gone. There is now a tower at the church with A Mighty Fortress Is Our God written in German near the top.

Luther and Melancthon are both entombed at this church.

There was a Wittenberg English Ministry church service conducted at the church.

From there we walked over to the Old Latin School where the leader there from SELK gave our group a short presentation. A lady from our group presented him with a cross carved from a hickory tree in Wittenberg, Missouri, which is in Perry County. It was a powerful moment.

After this we walked down to the Augusteum, which is the site of Martin Luther’s house. Unfortunately the house is not open due to renovations, but they did have a different museum exhibit going, which was like an ABCs of Martin Luther. We gave ourselves an accelerated tour because Thomas was going into great detail at each letter.

We had our final group dinner at the hotel tonight, buffet style. They had little pork medalions, caprese salad, and a bunch of German stuff that I skipped, like cabbage and au gratin potatoes. The desserts were a weird cup of chopped apples in syrup with white goop on top, or key lime pie. The key lime pie was pretty good. Shannon presented our gratuity to Thomas at the start of the meal.

After dinner Shannon and I walked back to the festival area, stopped at an ATM, checked out a few booths, and drank a Kirschbier, which is cherry beer. It was very good. We stuck around a bit to hear some Ska band do their sound check, then returned to the room.

Tomorrow we are free all day to attend the Wedding Festival, which Martin Luther would probably hate. The people in costumes are often times dressed quite anachronistically for a Reformation era event. Lots of them are dressed like vikings from the TV show. Many of the women have jingle bells on their feet. Pr. Hagen is going to take a group to the city church, St. Mary’s, where Luther did most of his preaching, at 9AM.

Sunday we board the bus at 5am to go to the Berlin airport, where we’ll fly to Newark NJ for an 8 hour layover before flying to St. Louis.

I forgot to mention the Eis after lunch. Shannon had cookie and macchiato. I went for zitrone (lemon) and watermelon. Both were delicious.