We made a decision last night to put the Rhine river cruise on our next "Northern Europe" trip. It would have consisted of a day of trains with a 1 hour cruise. We added the cruise much later in the planning phase so that's ok. Since Rothenburg is somewhat off the beaten path, you have to take a lot of slow trains to get here. Instead we will explore everything in Rothenburg.
Today we started off walking the medieval walls of the city. One of the stairs to get on the wall was right next to our hotel. This is one of the reasons to stay a night in Rothenburg. The tour buses start showing up around 10am, so if you get moving early you can practically have the entire town to yourself. We only passed one other couple on the wall, and we walked quite a distance.
Then we went back to the center of town to the Historical Vaults. Is was a small museum with a dungeon.
Stairs going down into the dungeon are extremely steep.
It was really dark down in the dungeon. Fortunately, my camera has some advanced settings to take a longer exposure which help brighten up the pictures.
Next we went to the Medieval Crime Museum. This was bigger with 4 floors of exhibits.
Just two doors down from our hotel is The Old Forge. A half-timbered house dating back to 1469.
After a brief respite at the hotel, we set off for the south end of Rothenburg and walked around the outside of the wall.
Here is the vineyard.
The farthest tower on the right (below) is one of the corners we walked around. The path stays pretty close to the wall.
Zoomed in from the picture above.
The path was pretty uneven.
Believe it or not, this is a castle. It was built in 1388 by Lord Mayor Heinrich Toppler. The moated castle was named after him and is called Toppler Castle. The zoom makes it look deceivingly close, but it was way down in the valley.
This was a timbered house just to the right of Toppler castle.
This is the Burggarten. A beautiful park now, but was once the location of a castle in the 11th century. It was later destroyed by an earthquake in 1356 and the stones were used to build the walls of the city.
On the Nightwatchman's tour, our guide pointed out this little door called a "man hole." It was designed to be only big enough for a man to get through after the gates had been closed for the evening to prevent an attack on the castle. It would only take a few people to get though the main gate to start a fire and destroy the city. A heavy fine was imposed on anyone who wanted to enter after the curfew as a way of preventing those who are habitually late.
Traveling back through town.
No comments:
Post a Comment