An early-morning start and a four-hour bus ride took us from Bacharach to Rothenburg, a very cute, touristy medieval Bavarian town. Over the centuries, Rothenburg has had its good times and its really, really bad times, and in the present time the town has been saved by tourism.
The town wall, bombed during WWII, has been reconstructed with the help of donations from individuals all over the world, including the USA. When you walk along the top of the wall, you can see plaques with the donors’ names and home towns, and how many meters of wall they paid for.
Most of our day in Rothenburg was free for us to explore as we wished.
After a lunch of schnitzel and beer at a sidewalk café, Tom and I climbed the Town Hall tower for a really great aerial view, and after that we visited Rothenburg’s Catholic Church, which has an altarpiece that supposedly contains a drop of Christ’s blood.
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| We climbed the white tower. |
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| The town square with very tiny people. |
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| Rothenburg at our feet! |
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| The Catholic church from the tower. |
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| Inside the church. |
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Pretty. Note the pipe organ. |
We finished up our afternoon by walking on the town wall back to our hotel.
We climbed to the top of one of the watchtowers along the wall for a few more pictures. This one shows the wall and the contrast between historic Rothenburg inside the wall and the newer part of town outside.
After dark, our tour group met at the town square to take the Night Watchman’s Tour. This guy has made a job for himself leading tours around, multiple times a night in different languages, and (it was my impression) kind of doing a German-accent imitation of Eric Idle, the guy from Monte Python. He did have historic information to relate though, so it was worthwhile and silly at the same time.
We finished our evening with gelato—and we weren’t even in Italy yet!
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