May 6 was such a lovely day...well, it ended up that way at least! We didn't get a ton of sleep on the overnight train from Rome, but we felt fairly decent when we got up at 5:30. During the process of getting ready in our cramped quarters, we must have hit the emergency button (that's the only thing we can think of) because all of a sudden the porter started yelling at us. Very emphatically. We didn't really understand the whole thing given he was ranting in German, but he did keep saying "what is your problem?" to which Bryan replied "nothing." After several rounds and some serious huffing, he came back with breakfast and said "I was in the wrong, I'm sorry." Still not quite sure what happened, but at least we were wide awake when we arrived in Munich! We were able to check in to our hotel despite the early hour, then took advantage of the best free breakfast of our trip before hopping a series of local trains out to Rothenburg ob der Tauber.
 |
| In the Munich train station, ready to head out. |
A few hours outside of Munich, Rothenburg is Germany's best-preserved midieval walled town. Despite being bombed in the final weeks of WWII, the wall remains intact and can be walked on all around the town. Love this place!!!
 |
| Entrance to the old town |
 |
| The somewhat-empty moat : ) The moat was only needed around part of the town, as the steep hill it was built on "protected" it in the back. |
 |
| We climbed 135 stairs up this tower (Roderator) for great views. |
 |
| Inside the town wall |
 |
| Need to exercise when it's raining? The wall walkway around the town is covered. How nice! |
 |
| View from the top of the Roderator |
Next we headed to the town city-center. Rothenburg still had their Easter decorations on display, including lots of blown-egg creations.
 |
| Is this place charming, or what!? |
 |
| Many of the Rothenburg bakeries had these "snowballs" - we weren't quite sure what they were, but they looked kind of good. |
Rothenburg is well-known for shops that sell Christmas decorations...they had every kind of decoration you could imagine! It would have been fun to get enough to do a whole tree...but that would have been cost (and luggage) prohibitive. So we had fun looking.
After lunch, we decided to climb the 214 stairs to the top of the City Hall tower. This ended up being a bit precarious at the top, but again, lovely views!
 |
| St. Jakob's Church |
Next we went to find St. Jakob's Church, which we'd seen from the tower.
 |
| This woodcarving, upstairs behind the organ, is the 35-foot-high Altar of the Holy Blood by Tilman Riemenschneider (the Michelangelo of woodcarvers). The detail is amazing! |
 |
| The church was quite tall...which is par for course for European churches I guess, but still impressed me. |
Next up we walked along the inside of the town wall to the Castel Garden, which was lovely and relaxing, and provided nice views of the wall and back into the town, as well as the surrounding countryside.
 |
| We thought this look door along the way was rather clever. |
 |
| Into the Castle Garden |
 |
| One of the many little side paths |
Then, alas, it was time to catch a train back to Munich, so I ran up the wall for one last picture, and off we went from the happy little place.
Rothenburg is a most wonderful place to spend a day, and we kind of wished we were spending the night there so we could have had a bit more time to browse shops, walk the whole wall, wander the Castle Garden more, and do a hike in the surrounding countryside. We did very much enjoy the time we had though - such a charming, relaxing place to wander around!
One of our connecting trains to Munich was running late, so we jumped on another one instead. Only to realize we hadn't checked what time it was arriving in Munich...it turned out to be a slow regional train that stopped at every single little town...and took almost 4.5 hours to get back. So we had dinner in the hotel restaurant, which turned out to be quite good, and then crashed out. Great day!!
No comments:
Post a Comment