Nuremberg, Germany to Rothenburg, Germany – October 4, 2012

Once again, cloudy skies prevailed in Germany when we woke up this morning.  It was a good night’s sleep for us both, the hotel was generally quiet, although we did hear some people at about 11:00 PM, opening and shutting doors somewhere, most likely on our floor.

The alarm was set for 6:30 AM once again, we are trying to get an early start to spend more time in Rothenburg, our next destination.  We were out of the hotel by about 8:15 AM and headed over to the underground metro station to ride part of the way to the Europcar Car Rental Agency, and walk the rest.  We changed metro trains under the main train station, and then headed three more stops to our departure point.  We still had about half a mile to walk, and found the area to be a little on the industrial side.  However, that seems to be typical for the car rental locations that are away from the train stations and airports.  We elect the more remote locations because there it quite a rental cost premium when you pick up a car at those more convenient locations, such as the train station.  However, sometime it may be worth the extra cost if the rental car facility is too far away, but a tough call in advance when you don’t really know.

The toughest part of exiting a subway station is to make sure you are going in the correct direction, since the underground exits can twist and turn before you actually get above ground.  We oriented ourselves to the roads from our map, and headed off in what we hoped was the correct direction.  Unfortunately, our city map was not detailed enough to see all of the cross streets names, only major ones, so we did not have a way to quickly confirm our direction.  I guess we could have used the GPS, but that was purely an afterthought.  Last trip, we had a compass, but had not really used it, so it stayed home.  After walking about 10 minutes, we got verification we were headed in the correct direction by noting the change in the name of the main street we were walking along, which we had anticipated seeing.  The Europcar rental car agency was not too much farther, easily identified by their green signs and flags.

We went into the office and filled out the paperwork for our rental car, a small VW Polo.  We knew we wanted a small car to navigate the narrow streets of Rothenburg, and the small parking spaces we remembered from our last visit there in 2010.  With the GPS running (now we thought about it!!) and our hotel address in Rothenburg selected, the next activity was to locate somewhere to pick up some breakfast.  As noted earlier, this was sort of an industrial area, and as we proceeded on the GPS route, there was not a lot of food stores along the way.  We finally saw a sign for an ALDI grocery store, and we hoped that they may have a fresh bread/pastry area with coffee.  Unfortunately, as seen at other ALDI’s we visited on our trip, they really do not have that type of “fresh” food available, as is usually the case at most of the other grocery store chains in Germany.  It is really common for the grocery stores to have fresh baked goods, sandwiches, and coffee, just like in the US, just not an ALDI.

We did fine some packaged pastries, and then headed over to a nearby Burger King for some coffee for me, and a diet Coke for Stephanie.  The fast food stores in Germany, like Burger King,  do not have the same breakfast menus as in the US, so no sausage and egg biscuits were to be had.  We sat in the parking lot and ate our breakfast items, not wanting to get on the Autobahn and try to eat  while dodging slow trucks and really fast cars, while driving 140 kph.

Once we finished breakfast, we headed out and got on the Autobahn.  This particular Autobahn was really crowded with trucks, more so than any we had ever seen before on our drives in Germany.  We wondered if the trucks were off the road for the holiday yesterday, and  that was causing truck traffic today even heavier today.  Generally they go slower, they are restricted to a maximum speed of 90 kph, and most times large trucks are generally never allowed in the left lane except in certain marked areas.  Even with these restriction, they can cause issues if there are a lot of trucks filing the right lane, and everyone is trying to pass in the high speed left lane.

We exited that Autobahn, and got onto another one, with far less truck traffic.  However, on this particular Autobahn, the cars were going  much faster than on the other one.  We were driving about 145-150 kph, and cars were flying by us.  I did get lights flashed at me one time while in the left lane, the first flash on this trip, but I was not really blocking them as I tried to also pass a slower truck.  Unfortunately, the VW Polo we had does not have much power, so accelerating to pass a truck after getting stuck behind it was not easy.

We exited off of the Autobahn after about an hour of driving from Nuremberg, and headed onto a secondary road into Rothenburg.  We had a map, and we had a GPS address for the hotel, but we still had trouble navigating the small cobbled streets of Rothenburg, trying to remember how to get to the back of the hotel, not the front where the GPS directed us to go .  The street in front of the hotel is either pedestrian only during the day, or limited to driving to hotels, or at least that is what we were told last time.  Thinking we knew better based on being here once before, we still got a little lost trying to find the back entry, not helped at all by some roads being shut for construction.  We had to exit the walled city and restart the entry, this time really concentrating on the directions.  The signs to designate one way streets are hard to understand and they usually are restricted only for certain hours.  After a few angry looks, and some unhappy pedestrians, we finally made it the second time to the hotel parking area behind the hotel.

We found a spot to park in the small hotel lot, and headed inside to check in.  It was only 11:30 AM, and our room was not yet ready.  We headed back to the car to get some of our gear to walk around and take pictures for about an hour while the room cleaning was completed.  It was easy for us to find our way around since we had spent two nights here on our last trip to Germany in 2010.  We headed to the town square, and then headed to the northern entrance, and visited the St. Wolfgang’s Church.  It was right on the fortified wall, so in addition to the church, there was a portion of the upper building that was the access to the battle emplacements, and another part underneath the church had been used as a dungeon.  The dungeon was a little dark and scary, there were just walkways and open areas, but you could not see well from one to the next.  Eventually you came back up another stairway at the other end of the church.

We took some other photos of the surrounding countryside from the city perimeter wall.  Rothenburg is on a hill, and on three sides, there is a steep cliff that is a natural protecting wall.  Only on one exposed side of the City was there a need to actually build a tall fortified wall for the protection of the city.

The weather seemed to be getting worse, we had occasional rain showers while we were out walking, so we decided to head back to the room to check to see if it was ready.  It had been over an hour since we had initially checked in.  We were glad to find that the room was ready, so we headed out to the car to get the luggage.  The room was in a different part of the hotel from where we stayed last time, and the room seemed to be larger.  The only detriment was that it was on the third floor, so we had to carry all of our baggage up an additional flight of stairs that was steep and curved around a corner.  As we were bringing in our bags, the rain intensity increased to a steady rain, much more than the occasional showers we had been getting.  It continued to rain as we unpacked for the night, so we decided just to stay in until it diminished.

After about 45 minutes, the sun appeared, so we hurriedly gathered our normal camera gear for our backpacks and headed out, hoping to capture the beauty of the city in the sunshine.  On our last stay in Rothenburg, it had rained both days, and we never saw blue skies.  The sunshine was short lived.  By the time we got outside, the sun was gone and the rain showers were back.  We needed to eat lunch anyway, so we stopped in a small cafe and had a bratwurst and fries.  It was still raining lightly so we decided to visit a few of the stores.  It continued to rain, and now the wind was blowing, making it harder to stay dry, and keep the umbrellas from being inverted by the wind.  We headed back to the room to wait out the weather.  We looked online, and it appeared that the rain would be over soon, based on the weather radar.  We worked on photos and blog postings, catching up from the two previous days.

Eventually, the weather did clear at about 4:30 PM, so we once again headed out for some photos of the city in the sunshine.  There were still a few periods of clouds, but overall, it was sunny, and much cooler.  The wind was still blowing, but at least the rain was over.  We walked through the old palace gardens, and got some good photos of the city overlooking the river valley.

We had initially intended to eat at the hotel restaurant for dinner, but since we had eaten a late lunch, and we wanted to do the Night Watchman tour at 8:00 PM, we opted to go to the little grocery store in town and pick up some items for a snack in the room.  We would have either had to eat an early dinner, difficult since we were still full from the late lunch, or try and get some dinner after the tour, which ended at 9:00 PM.  Unfortunately, the restaurant also closed at 9:00 PM, so we did not have a lot of choices.

We had a nice snack of cheese, croissants (From ALDI in Nuremberg), crackers, and a desert from one of the pastry shops, along with some red wine, also from our earlier jaunt to ALDI.

We headed out to the Night Watchman’s tour at about 7:40 PM, taking some flash pictures of some of the buildings while we waited for the tour to begin.  It was pretty cold outside, and we were glad we had bundled up.  The “watchman” was the same person we saw last time here, he has been doing these presentations for about 10 years.  At least this time it was not raining like it had done in 2010, so the tour was much more enjoyable, as we did not have to fight with everyone’s umbrellas to be able to see and hear his presentation.

The tour presentation was just as good this time, and we enjoyed it much better without the rain  The only issue was that the crowd was a little larger, but it was still manageable.

Afterward, we headed back to the room.  We are going to try and get up early tomorrow so we have some more time in Rothenburg to do some sightseeing before check-out at 12:00 PM.  We will be heading to Frankfurt, our last stop before returning home.  We are staying in a hotel close to the Frankfurt Airport, and will keep the rental car so that it is easier to get to the airport in the morning (no shuttle bus).  We will just turn the rental car in as we go to the airport to fly home.