LAUREL DECHER

“Life in the Seven Kingdoms is never dull . . .” –Jen McConnel, School Library Journal

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Tag: Seven Kingdoms Fairy Tales

Tour Magenta Kingdom: Festung Ehrenbreitstein in Koblenz

View from Ehrenbreitstein Fortress. Rhine and Mosel Rivers come together at the Deutscher Eck.

This huge fortress houses several museums and restaurants and a Youth Hostel, in case the family wants to try sleeping inside a fortress! The imposing entrance to the fortress that guards the Rhine and Mosel Rivers from above. Ehrenbreitstein means “Honor Broad Stone”. The fortress overlooks the German city of Koblenz Koblenz is the next […]

Tour Cochem Kingdom: the real home of TROUBLE WITH PARSNIPS

Cochem castle with flower boxes

Trouble With Parsnips For your reading pleasure, a shiny new edition is in the works! The nameless inventor princess of Cochem is headed to Kickstarter to build something new! Follow along! Steep vineyards going up to Reichsburg Cochem Reichsburg Cochem, the inspiration for the Cochem Kingdom in the Seven Kingdom Fairy Tales series: There were […]

Tour a Fairy Kingdom???

What does fairyland look like to you? Clear, rushing water and green leaves under the trees. Near Kell, Rhineland Pfalz. Germany. ©Laurel Decher, 2020. What does a Fairy Kingdom look like for you? On this hike, we walked for five or six hours and I got buckets of new ideas about the Fairy Kingdom. I […]

Tour the Blackfly Kingdom: Pfalzgrafenstein Castle

View of the Pfalz castle from the ferry

When we travel these days, we often drive or fly. In earlier times, the rivers were the highways. Big and long rivers, like the Rhine River in Germany were important for delivering people and things. [Is that why Amazon is named after a river in Brazil? I don’t know, do you?] If you visit, you […]

How to make something invisible

Think how much writing–and reading–you could get done if no one knew you were there. This is eerily simple: just use 4 lenses to bend the light around the thing you want to “cloak.”  Will we resort to deep sea fish later to help us find things in the “dark”?

Exploring: Hatzenport to Eltz Castle on the Path of Dreams

Grassy trail above Mosel river valley in Germany. The Path of Dreams – Traumpfad  One morning, in early spring, my husband and I decided to walk to Burg Eltz (Eltz castle) from the tiny village of Hatzenport. We had asked the innkeeper if he thought Burg Eltz was do-able and he said, “Why shouldn’t it […]