Heraldry on Our Trip to Europe

I always enjoy traveling to new places, because I just know that I’m going to find heraldry if I look for it. (And sometimes even if I don’t look for it!)

This past September we took a trip to Europe (where I knew there would be a lot of coats of arms and other armorial insignia to see and enjoy) to attend the XXIX International Congress of Genealogical and Heraldic Sciences in Stuttgart, Germany, with a day trip to Heidelberg (where my great-grandfather was born), and then a five-day stay in Florence, Italy. Because, you know, if you’re going to spend the money to fly to Europe already anyway, you might as well also go ahead and stay a few days more and visit someplace you’ve wanted to see for years.

And while I’ve often said that “You can find heraldry everywhere,” I did not even suspect how soon in the trip we would see it. Did you know that Lufthansa names each of their planes after a city in Germany, and places a plaque with that city’s coat of arms in each plane? So here just for you are the first and last coats of arms I saw on our trip, from the aircraft Koblenz which we flew from Dallas to Frankfurt, and from the aircraft Wilhelmshaven, which we flew from Frankfurt to Dallas.

Really, you can find heraldry everywhere!  Even 30,000 feet (or however high up we were) in the air.