July 12- Bacharach and Berg Eltz

Last time we visited Rothenberg, we felt like we were leaving before we had seen everything. This time, we feel like we’ve at least seen the important spots in the town. When we drove out of the gate in the town walls, through the arch of the Rodertor, we felt satisfied that we had “done” this town and were ready for what the next might bring.

We drove on a relatively uneventful drive past Frankfort, across the Rhine River, and to the little town of Bacharach, right on the Rhine. The original plan for the day was to take a cruise down the Rhine to Koblenz and catch a train back. When we got to Bacharach we visited the ticket booth for the boats and the town’s visitors center for the train schedules. Our plan was possible to do, but we wouldn’t be starting until around 3:00. We decided to put off the river cruise until tomorrow. That would give us more of a chance to explore and less of a hectic feeling with the schedules.

So what to do instead? We had two options: Explore the town of Bacharach (which was Julie’s choice) or go look somewhere else for some fun (which was Scott’s choice). The problem with staying in Bacharach is it’s not that big of a place. We stopped here for lunch, and our spot for the night is here, but we decided to spend the day elsewhere.

We had lunch in Bacharach though. Walking down the street, an older woman who owned a restaurant started talking to Emma because she saw her stuffed fox. She took Emma in and showed her a real fox that her father had caught. She told us how he had tried baiting the fox. He’d set out a piece of meat every day for two years, but the fox would always steal the meat without getting caught. Then one day, her father came in with the fox in hand and said he couldn’t believe how big it was. “No wonder!” she said. “He’d been feeding it for two years.” We stayed and had brots for the parents and spaghetti for the girls.

We went off into the German countryside, looking for the castle called Berg Eltz. We were able to see quite a bit of the Rhine and Mosel area because… well, we got lost. We only had an imprecise idea of where the Berg Eltz is, and the AAA road maps and German roadsigns were not enough to get us there. Julie eventually stopped and asked some truckers for directions, and while they weren’t precise, they did get us to the castle. (The first thing we did after visiting the castle was buy the decent German road map we’d said we’ve needed for a while.)

When we finally arrived at Berg Eltz, it was pretty late in the afternoon, around 4:00. We decided to pay the extra amount to ride the shuttle bus “up” to the castle, and said we would walk back “down.” At probably every other castle in Europe, this would have been a great plan. For some reason, Eltz is built in a valley. So we rode down to it, and had to climb up out of the valley afterwards.

Berg Eltz is a pretty amazing castle. It seems to be 8 to 10 stories tall, depending on how you count, and it’s architecture is a mix of heavy stone defense and light half-timbered areas at the top. The other amazing thing about the castle is that it is still owned by the same family that has always owned it. The Eltz family can trace their time at the castle back 33 generations, and one branch of it still lives there. The castle has a hundred rooms, and we were shown about ten of the grandest ones. The dates are dumbfounding. We were seeing pieces that have been in the family’s possession since the 1300s, 1400s, and 1500s. The walls that we were seeing were done with their original murals (or were they frescos?). Julie noted that it seemed unusual that the place wasn’t climate controlled to protect the precious fabrics in the tapestries and paint in the art. Not only were the windows wide open, but there was actually a bird flying around in one of the bedrooms.

We ate at Burger King (just to keep with the castle theme, right? They don‘t seem to have White Castle over here, so…) and accidentally went through the drive through lane. We got to see and hear Mommy use her German to order. It may not have been different than what she’s done at other places, but it was the first time that we have had chance to listen to her. We all cheered her when she finished.

So a brief recap on the castles so far:

• Hohenschwangau- mid-19th century reconstruction of a castle, Romantically done by a real king for a summer home.
  
• Neuschwanstein- late-19th century fantasy castle, Romantically planned and epic in design, but never finished or substantially used. More of a personal work of art than a building.
  
• Ehrenberg- 13th century castle, now simply a shell of ruins, though picturesque
  
• Toppler’s Castle- 600 years old, but more of a goofy architectural oddity than a proper castle.
  
• Berg Eltz- Very old (not sure of date- 14th century, maybe?) and took 500 years to complete. Continuously occupied by the same family that now have treasures centuries old to display.
  

Which was our favorite? Honestly, it may be the one that we happen to be at when the question is asked. They all have tremendous things to offer, but they are also a study in contrasts.

Which brings us to our place for the night- Stahleck Castle in Bacharach. We don’t know the age of the castle, but it is a real castle, part of the old fortifications around the Rhine River town. It has been turned into a hostel, and we are sleeping here for tonight. It is not easy to get to. We had to climb to the hills above the town. It is very steep and was quite a hard walk. Luckily, Julie had planned ahead and packed a single backpack with our things for tonight. Scott had to carry a second with the computer. The girls each brought an animal of their own. We’re staying in a room overlooking the Rhine River. (It actually is a dorm style room for about ten people, but it looks like we’ll be the only ones in it.)

In fact, this part of the blog is being typed in the courtyard of the castle. We’ve watched the shadow of the hill that we are on creep slowly up the Rhine Valley. The crickets are chirping on the hillside. Barges are carrying their cargos along the river far below us. We’ve been eating popcorn on the terrace. The other guests are chatting nearby. Anna and Emma wrote in their journals outside on the terrace tonight, and each of them said their high for today was staying in this real castle for the night.

July 11- Rothenberg ob der Tauber

Our bunk double-bed in this room is big, but the room itself is small. The bathroom is even smaller. The toilet is put in diagonally to make it fit, and the sink pokes you in the side as you sit there. Still, it’s a bright cheery room, and very cozy. It’s also so nice to have a room so close to where the action is, where we can stop and freshen up and drop off our shopping goodies during the day.

We started out exploring the streets of the town and soaking up the ambiance provided by the half-timbered houses. The streets are filled with tourist shops hawking the typical German souvenirs- steins, cuckoo clocks, teddy bears, Christmas ornaments, and so forth. Those are fun to look in, and we did our share of shopping through the day. Emma bought a red dragon figurine and Anna eventually bought a black and purple fairy. Julie got a patch for her jacket. We also bought a few necessities. One of the pairs of shorts that we brought Emma to wear is really too small to stay up on her hipless waist. At least a few tourists were smiling at her efforts to try to keep her pants up while carrying her stuffed fox around. We found a pair of jeans that fit her much better. We also found a apoteke (drug store) that had a food section and we bought what we needed for another picnic.

During our browsing this morning, we found an internet café that allowed us to upload the last two days and also catch up on some of the pictures that we couldn’t upload before. Scott liked this particular café to blog from because he could look out the window as he was waiting for things to upload and see the sun shining up the street on the half-timbered houses. (By the way, it’s interesting that German keyboards are set up differently. Most German keyboards have the “Z” and “Y” changed, so the first row is QWERTZUIOP. Many of the punctuation marks are in different places too, including the @ sign and the _ which we use a lot. This keyboard had the keys in the German place, but reacted as if it was American. When you pushed Z you got Y. That made things slightly more confusing, but the scenery and the opportunity to catch up more than made up for it.)

While Dad was blogging, the rest of the family was sampling schneeballs. Schneeballs are a desert concoction peculiar to Rothenberg and are found in many shops in town. They look like doughnut holes, but are bigger than your fist, and come with many different toppings like sugar, cinnamon, and chocolate. They are actually much harder than they look, and taste a lot like some fried dough items that you can get at county fairs. We weren’t crazy about them, and the girls only ate a few. Luckily, we had only bought the small sampler bag of the mini-schneeballs.

Anna spent some of the time taking pictures of flowers with her own camera. She's been taking pictures of nearly every flower that she's seen in town and it must amount to a few hundred by now. We've had to ration her camera batteries, but she's having fun.

Just as the tides of incoming tourists were starting to swell in the streets of the city, we found a way to keep to ourselves. We took our picnic lunch outside the Burgtor, the tower of the main gate of the city, where there is a pretty little park. We ate our ham and cheese sandwiches and pretzels on a bench while we enjoyed the view.

Then we followed Julie’s plan. She wanted to see the “Toppler Castle” which is outside of the city walls, and she had been studying Rick Steves’s directions on how to walk to it. We marched down the virtual cliffs on that side of the city to the banks of the Tauber River (actually, more of a large stream), and tried to follow Rick Steves’s directions. He said to cross at the covered bridge? There’s no covered bridge here. Let’s go along the river until we see it. We continued to walk all the way to the next town, Detwar, when we were finally convinced that there was not going to be any covered bridge or castle in that direction. We asked a few people for help, and eventually found a nice older man who helped us in English, though with a heavy German accent. As he started to give us directions to Toppler’s Castle, he began by asking where our car was. We said it was back in Rothenberg and we had walked. “Vot? Oh my Gott!” He couldn’t believe it. Still, he headed us back to where we came from to find what Scott was starting to think was a mythical castle.

We did enjoy the country side as we walked along the Tauber, though. We learned a lot of things too. For example, we learned that the fish that live in the Tauber river don’t eat pretzels or cheese. We saw an authentic German alpaca farm. And we saw that some people still keep pigeons as pets.

As we arrived back at the base of the hill that Rothenberg sits on, we eventually found the covered bridge from the original directions, and continued past it to eventually find the “Castle.” Toppler, it’s owner is the most famous bugermeister of the medieval city. He built this building 600 years ago. It isn’t really a castle, but rather perhaps a fortified house. It looks for all the world like a pale blue two story house stuck up on a pillar. It was a bit anti-climactic after that long circuitous journey to get there. We went back to the covered bridge and went back the way we should have came. The trip was very steep, but much shorter. When we arrived back at the town walls we discovered the mistake that we had made in interpreting Rick Steves’s directions. We were all exhausted, but we did have a bit of enjoyable exercise in the German countryside on a sunny afternoon for it.

Scott was going to try to be strong and not buy anything today, but he eventually broke down. When we got back from our long hike to the garden where we had our picnic lunch, there was a case and stand set up for a street performer who had obviously just stepped away for a moment. We waited for him to come back and we heard him perform some traditional German folk tunes on a classical guitar. He was dressed Middle Agey, like a minstrel. We ended up buying a CD from him. It’s obviously homemade, and doesn’t have any singing on it to help learn the songs, but at least we actually heard him perform by the walls of Rothenberg. (We also saw him twice later, so that adds to the memories). Later, Scott also bought two parts to a comic book (or a graphic novel if you want to sound pretentious) called Toppler, King of Rothenberg. After we walked so far to see his “castle,” it seemed worth it to buy the story. (Scott has also missed two comic-book Wednesdays so far. Don at Don’s Atomic Comics in Depew is holding titles for him as they come in through July. We paid him in advance so we knew we’d have enough money.) He also bought the Night Watchman’s DVD at the end of the tour in the evening. So much for being strong.

We considered listening to a concert that the Ambassadors of Music were going to perform. It is an organization that sends choruses and bands of young Americans to several European locations to perform. This group was made up of kids from South Dakota and Minnesota. However, the church pews were so uncomfortable that we were tired of sitting on them before the concert even began. They had a large ridge along the top of them that poked you right at the top of your back. Though we didn’t stay for the concert, we saw them wearing blue jackets all over town.

We stopped for drinks and ice cream at one of the hotels as we entered the town. Emma was napping by this point. Julie got apple strudel with ice cream, but was most impressed with something that she hasn’t seen very much this last week- ice cubes in her drink! Europeans serve their beverages cold, but don’t add the superfluous ice to them. Even when she asked for ice later at dinner tonight, the waitress responded that they didn’t have any.

We visited St. Jakob’s Kirke (Chruch) which is actually more like a cathedral in its design. It has a lot of scaffolding up around its outside, but the interior was something we had missed in 2001. We examined the windows and the art, and marveled at its age (The windows went back to 1400 or before. Why isn’t our church in Cheektowaga able to keep up its building when it is merely a hundred years old?) We also saw the carved altar carved by Tilman Riemenschneider, who is supposed to be the Michelangelo of woodcarving. We stayed quietly until the church closed.

We had dinner again in our hotel because the girls loved the sausages that were served last night. They are spiced a bit like breakfast sausages, and Dad got a plateful of them too. We went back to the hotel room to freshen up, but Julie fell fast asleep. It took a lot of effort to wake her up for the next tour.

Shortly before 20:00 (8:00 PM), we assembled in the town square with many other Americans for the Night Watchman’s tour. He gives a very engaging, though brief, tour of the town in the character of a medieval night watchman. (He is featured in several videos of Rick Steves and is a highly recommended favorite of his. We forgave Mr. Steves for our diversion this afternoon and took the tour this evening.) Everyone in the large group seemed to appreciate his stories and humor. He told about the duties of a night watchman and the less then romantic side of medieval city life (like the stink and the disease). He gave us a brief overview of the history of Rothenberg, its rise as a medieval trade and textile center, its fall during the Thirty Years war, the long years that it lay fallow, and its rebirth as a tourist destination beginning around the 1890s. He pointed out a few of the “older” building that date back to the 1300s, and some of the features of their architecture. Perhaps most interesting, he explained how it was that Rothenberg survived until the present day as the most well-preserved medieval city. It was “preserved by poverty” for hundreds of years until it was discovered by the Romantics. It was then saved from devastation during WWII by an American general who remembered the picture of the town that his mother used to have hanging on her wall. Also interestingly, he waited until the end of the tour to collect the fee for it because, as he said, “There are always more people at the end of the tour than there are at the beginning.” It was really amazing how many people honestly stayed to pay him. We didn’t see anyone sneaking away, and by the time the crowd paid him he certainly had a hat full of money.