We said good bye to Munich and headed out to Rothenburg ob der Tauber and Wurzburg stopping in scenic villages along the way. Trusty Best Trips from Lonely Planet guided our way. This was a great guide for Ireland last year and it has not let us down yet.
The first stop was Donauwörth with an interesting Liebfraukirche with the movie theater seating across the floor that drops 4 feet from the back of the church forward. We’ve stopped to pick up freshly baked bread and sweet buns while there.
Next was Harburg. We climbed the hill for the beautiful red turreted castle, took a bunch of pictures of the countryside and kept going.
Norlingen’s claim to fame was having been built in a middle of a crater created by a meteorite some 15MM years ago. That resulted in the town having nearly perfectly circular town wall. Polinchik found a hummingbird hawk moth - a moth that closely resembles the bird. We spend some time to find a perfect shot.
Onto Dinkelsbuhl - picture perfect little town down to the most remote street in its outskirts - we know because Romik decided to drive right in the middle of old town on our monster truck. We wandered the streets marveling the absolute perfection of everything around. Stopped to have lunch in the of town.
Next we decided to skip a few towns on the route and get into Wuzburg, which should have been the highlight of the day.
After all the eye-candy earlier, dusty hot town with crowds of tourists was generally a downer. Residenz, Versailles wanna be was just that. On the other hand Dom St. Killian was very impressive. Giant cavernous cathedral was an institution: it beautifully combined modern religious art with magnificent bronze grave stones, gorgeous organs (I counted 3), and multiple nooks and chapels where one could probably conduct the church business in parallel across multiple channels: somber meetings of church elders in the cellars with the giant sarcophagi, remembrance meetings in the chapel for deceased clergy, baptisms in the bright side chapels and so on.
We decided the issue with big towns that they are too big, noisy, and whatever damage they’ve suffered in the war they simply had no resources to rebuild with the same consistency so you get the cardboard box placeholders and concrete monstrosities sucking the life right out of the precious few historic beauties in between.
Completely frustrated we sat down in one of the alleyways for some iced macchiatos and ice-cream for kids served with kindness by one of locals seemingly in touch with our predicament :) Thus reassured we set out for the final stop of the day - Rothenburg.
It was completely and utterly awesome!! It was like Dinkelbuhl on steroids - street upon street of awesomeness surrounded by complete medieval wall. We checked into the Golden Antelope (we joked earlier on the trip Глупое Животное - слишком много не бывает so it fit perfectly) and continued to wander through town surprisingly sharing the streets with crowds of Asians. Many streets had store signs in Japanese and Chinese that added charm to town.
We had a moment of panic at 9pm when we realized that most of the restaurants in town are either closed already, or full, or about to close in 30. Fortunately Polinchik found us Chinese restaurant - the first restaurant on our trip that has the A/C which was very welcome.
We had a wonderful evening. Dan hid our cell phones so we could not compulsively check on Trump news every spare moment. We communicated with Chinese and German-only speaking restaraunteers using the body language and it was very funny. Love this town.
Can he also hide my phone while he's at it? Sounds like a gorgeous town.
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