Sunday 3rd September 2023
The Romantic Road is a post-WWII concept aimed at reviving tourism in Bavaria, stringing together a bunch of picturesque medieval towns and castles roughly south to north. Augsburg is one of them. Today we drove the road north, taking in Harburg, Dinkelsbuhl and ending in Rothenburg on der Tauber.
Rothenburg is the crown prince of medieval towns. Seriously, no contest anywhere I’ve ever been. Although I should clarify that I mean medieval in the mid-20th-century-Hollywood sense of medieval! The bones underneath are indisputably genuine, the old town wall, the towers and churches, many of the houses. On top of this they have layered a lot of careful restoration and cheerful medieval kitsch. We were lucky enough to arrive on the final day of a summer medieval festival, so we had the added glamour of various bands of medieval musicians and craftsmen filling the town with their music and atmosphere. There was straw on the streets.
I’m getting ahead though. Harburg is a pretty little town on a wide flowing river, though we only looked down upon it from the mightly Harburg Fortress that hangs on a bluff above it. You pay a few euros to visit the fortress, but even that felt a little cheeky as you can only really wander around the courtyard and peer out at the view from one spot – all the actual towers and the walltop walkway are barred to you.
Dinkelsbuhl is a wonderful town. The only thing Rothenburg has that Dinkelsbuhl lacks is topography: it’s on a hill. That’s a big plus, though, as all the most beautiful towns, cities and villages on the planet are inevitably built on hills.
Dinkelsbuhl does incredibly well given its flat river plain setting. We ambled around beautiful ponds and moats, we ate pizza pastries for lunch, we stumbled on a local brewery that does great beer, we got pooped on by a stork. Dinkelsbuhl has a lot of stork nests.
Our eventual entry to Rothenburg was surreptitious and illicit. The town gates all had signs saying no entry to traffic until 9pm on Sunday. But our hotel was right in the middle of the old town? So we just drove in anyway, got a dirty look from a local, and then sneaked through to park at our hotel. The old fella on the front desk was surprised and amused that we had flaunted the rules. It didn’t seem worth complaining that their website didn’t give any hint about this issue for people arriving by car! The hotel has the best situation in the town, perched right on the town walls overlooking the wooded countryside beyond. It is amiably old-fashioned.
Too hungry before dinner, we sampled the local speciality while strolling about – a “snowball” which is basically a ball of crispy pastry scraps dipped in thick caramel or chocolate sauce. Yum, but at the same time terrible. Luckily we still did pretty well with our meat-n-starch meal of slow-cooked venison/beef with spaetzle/dumpling and juniper/goulash gravy. They eat early in Germany! We had the restaurant to ourselves by 9pm and the head waiter waved us a cheerful goodbye as he went home, leaving the last member of staff cleaning up around us.
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