Pictures of Our Trip to the Monastery

We finally made it out of the ancient Roman empire and we are now in the Middle Ages.  Knights, peasants, vikings, and Monks etc.  I thought it would be appropriate to take a field trip to a monastery to learn more about Monks and hopefully look at some old hand written books.

Here are the boys at the monastery.  
The Anchor is pretending to be a monk.

I really wanted to get a picture of a monk, but I was afraid I might interrupt their prayers or something, so I turned into a monk paparazzi.  Here's what I got:

Monk robe behind the stair rail...

Monk behind the bush...

Monk in the distance...

The back of a monk...

These two are too loud to be monks and I don't know why The Anchor is saluting.  

Didn't expect to see a bison at the monastery, but we did.  

They had all sorts of dead, stuffed animals in their museum.  

And a replica of the crown of thorns that Jesus wore on the cross.  

These are from the Mount of Olives.

We also noticed lots of crosses everywhere.

On the walkways...

 And on the buildings...

The nice lady in the gift shop told us that we could ask the librarian to see the special room where they keep the old books.  They did let us into a temperature and light controlled room and let us explore on our own.  She even said we could look inside the books if we were careful.  Some of the books were over 500 years old!! (They have a vault with books that are even older than that, but we were not allowed to go in there.)  This was by far the most exciting part of our trip.  

Here is an old Bible with a wooden cover...

Ritual for the Archdiocese of Cologne, Germany 1728

There was not way to open this book without breaking the seals.  It reminded me of this verse in the Bible:   

"Worthy are You to take the book and to break its seals ; for You were slain, and purchased for God with Your blood men from every tribe and tongue and people and nation.  You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to our God ; and they will reign upon the earth." Revelation 5:9,10

Handwritten song sheets...

You could see the shiny gold the monks used to decorate these letters.

This was The Free One's favorite Bible.  

It was made of wood and was very heavy.

We also liked the super fancy velvety Bibles...

It was so quiet and serene at the Abbey, I didn't think it would be appropriate to be snapping pictures of everything.  There are so many more things we saw that I don't have photos of.  After our tour we rested a while in the coffee shop where we bought some coffee, hot cocoa, and treats.  All in all it was a lovely, peace filled field trip.  I would highly recommend a trip to a monastery.

You can take a virtual tour of this one online here:   http://www.mountangelabbey.org/