Middendorf's age permitted him to go only with the youngest pupils, who made the shortest trips.
These excursions led the little boys into the Thuringian Forest, the Hartz Mountains, Saxony and Bohemia, Nuremberg and Wurzburg, and the older ones by way of Baireuth and Regensburg to Ulm.

The large boys in the first travelling party, which was usually headed by Barop himself, extended their journey as far as Switzerland.
I visited in after-years nearly all the places to which we went at that time, and some, with which important events in my life were associated, I shall mention later.

It would not be easy to reproduce from memory the first impressions received without mingling with them more recent ones.
Thus, I well remember how Nuremberg affected me and how much it pleased me.

I express this in my description of the journey; but in the author of Gred, who often sought this delightful city, and made himself familiar with life there in the days of its mediaval prosperity, these childish impressions became something wholly new.

And yet they are inseparable from the conception and contents of the Nuremberg novel.
My mother kept the old books containing the accounts of these excursions, which occupied from two to three weeks, and they possessed a certain interest for me, principally because they proved how skilfully our teachers understood how to carry out Froebel's principles on these occasions.