It was a reasonably early start for us in Frankfurt this morning (24/8). We decided to deprive ourselves of breakfast for a while and push on to Wurzberg (there are meant to be German umlouts in some of these words but I have no bloody idea how to get those in there) to find food. We travelled for about an hour and were pretty starving so Grant and I ordered an obscene amount of food and heartily gobbled it all up, much to the enjoyment of Bea, Ji and the staff at the bakery. Everything only came to about 6 euro each though, shit yeah! We then went for a bit of a wander and found this:
We ended up going into "the residence" which apparently means "some big ass swanky house". It was pretty incredible, I felt pretty uncultured compared to my seasoned traveller friends (who have been inside swankier places) but I thought all the paintings on the ceilings, and intense pictures of Alexander the great conquering shit on rugs hanging on the walls was the most elaborate stuff ever.
The garden was equally swanky:
Then we hit the Romantische strasse (Romantic road) at about midday, which was a problem because we had just spent half a day at the start of the road and there was 5 days worth of stuff to cram in. After looking around the first couple of stops on the romantic road we decided that we needed to speed up the trip a bit. We added structure (when in Rome) by introducing a drive-by-voting system, where we each said yay or nay to stop at the town. We also introduced a rule where we all had two "hey lets go check that out" points and if the place was crap we lost a point, if the place was good then you got 2 extra points. Bea lost one of hers instantly with a pathetic side street. We were losing a bit of faith in the road (due to a wimpy sundial in Rottengen and a generally lacklustre Bad Mergentheim, maybe the names were a givaway) when we hit the beautiful and serene Rothenburg. As Grant said "it was like the greatest hits of everything we had seen so far. We went up a tower thing for some sweet views and spent a long time wandering the streets.
Almost too much time as we checked our watches at 4:50pm and decided we should look for accommodation there. We raced back to the information center and booked a couple of rooms just before they closed at 5pm. We checked into a great little place for 25 euro each including breakfast. It was above a little shop that sells general foodstuffs, fresh vegetables and model cars. Hilarious combo. With a bit more daylight on our hands we circumnavigated the town around its medieval wall:
most of which we could walk inside. Wearily we staggered back to our accommodation and found that there was walking tour that started in 10mins time. After much debating if we should go or not we decided to go wait at the start point and make a decision there. When the tour guide turned up our decision was made for us as he was in a full "night watchman" costume complete with halberd and a candle lantern. It was a really great tour and included an interesting bit of history as follows: in WW2 they tried to bomb Rothemburg by plane but it was too foggy so most of the shells missed. Then they decided to shell the hell out of it with artillery until some American joker caught wind of it. This American jokers Mum had been to Rothemburg before he was born and fell in love with the place, accordingly he grew up hearing about this wonderful wee town and so requested that the artillery plan was abandoned. Instead they requested that Rothemburg surrenders. Luckily the Nazi General that was usually station at Rothemburg was away and the Major that was left in charge decided to accept surrender (he suspected that the war would soon be over anyway) despite that fact that he would be tried for treason if he was caught "surrendering". So Rothemburg surrendered, was saved and the war finished days later. Hope that story didn't need more Dragons for ya.
We then tracked down some amazing Wiener Schnitzel for dinner to round off a cracker Day 1. Holy crap, I guess this is what happens when I write this down when everything is fresh in my mind, too much writing me thinks!
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