Wine and a Goat in Rothenberg

So I've been struggling to get this blog written because a lot of what I thought made it interesting isn't really present - that is, the actual struggle. The mistakes we make... our "misadventures... and more importantly, what we've learned from them and what advice I can offer future travelers. We've made almost no mistakes this trip... are we getting too good at this? Is this getting boring or is it just me?

Anyway, we had about a three hour drive to Rothenburg ob der Tauber which is a picturesque, old German walled city. In fact, it is supposed to be the most well preserved walled city in the country. With a title like that, you expect a lot of tourists... and you'd be correct. Here's the first mistake we made, actually: we drove into the walled city. Don't do this. It only costs five euros per 24 hours to park just outside the wall and you can walk in... but we thought, hey, the gps is taking us to the hotel, let's just have a peak inside and see where it is. The city is comprised of narrow, cobble stoned streets with bus loads of tourists moseying about with ice cream cones staring at the sky and not noticing the car behind them. And then yes, we accidentally drove through the main square right next to about 50 people dining outside (where is no distinction between sidewalk and street). Whoops. Turns out lots of cars do this and it isn't actually prohibited... it's just so difficult that people who do it once probably don't do it again (like us). I said to Andy, let's get out of here... which way back to the wall? Drive in any direction, he said. Lol.

After we manage to park the car in a lot outside the wall, it's a short walk to the hotel. This is the only hotel we're staying at this trip and it's really nice :) We have a really nice balcony overlooking the town and a mini bar stocked with wine and beer.

Seeing as it was a gorgeous day (we got lucky again, it did rain a bit that morning when we were still in Bacharach and on the drive), we ate lunch outside and walked along the old town streets and along the wall and into the gardens. There isn't a ton to do in this city... there is a medieval torture museum, but that's not really my cup of tea. We visited St Jacob's Church which is in the main square and sat down for some giant ice cream sundaes (because why not?).

 You see where those people are sitting right where the umbrellas are? We drove right through there...

Old German beauty

I know, he doesn't look nearly happy enough for how delicious those were

Hotel balcony :)

Our evening in Rothenburg was actually just very relaxing. We found that we very much appreciated getting out of the big cities for a few days. We went for a walk around Convent Garden and along the old town walls. Andy got a pretzel bigger than his head and we made friends with a goat!

I had no idea how he was still eating at this point

 View of the gardens from the wall

 Goofing around again! 

Little baby grapes from the vineyard (top left)!

 Shot of the whole vineyard

Mr Goat showin' me his teeth

We bought some wine from an old lady running a shop who claimed to make it herself. Andy is skeptical and didn't believe her (he didn't tell the lady this, of course... just me, later). Why wouldn't you believe an old lady claiming to make all the wine in the shop herself?! Ha. I don't care if it's just something she tells the tourists, wine tastes better when you believe that it was made with love by someone's grandma. That must be her vineyard I took pictures of!

So that's our night in Rothenburg! Wandering around, eating, and spending the evening drinking all the wine we bought from the lady... polishing off the rest in our mini bar... and also the beer in the mini bar (it wasn't THAT much).

The homemade wine! I'm SO MAD I forgot to the bottles in the room :( They would have looked cute on our bar

Sunset from the balcony

The next morning we had a delicious hotel breakfast complete with weisswurst (did you know those are traditionally only for breakfast? Apparently Eric made a server very grumpy in, I think, Munich when he asked for weisswurst for lunch, lol). After check out, we got back in our trusty hybrid for our last drive of this trip. It was only about an hour and twenty minutes to Nuremberg... we had quite the adventure trying to get the car returned.

The first silly thing that happened was that the car's navigation system told us we had a two hour traffic delay on our hour and twenty minute journey... well that sounds awful, right? But google on Andy's phone showed nothing. Lesson of the day is, always trust google... it knows everything. The sections that were supposed to be completely jammed up were completely normal traffic (aka, 100 mph). Get it together, Toyota Navi. So we roll into Nuremberg assuming that we'll find a gas station between the autobahn and the main train station downtown... nope. Of course. So I'm sitting in downtown Nuremberg traffic while Andy frantically maps a gas station (seriously thank goodness we had a working smart phone this trip, we went completely off the grid for all our trips before this... never doing that again). He finds one only a half mile away in the complete opposite direction! One questionable U-Turn later, we pull into this gas station and realize it's only Super Premium or Diesel. UGH. The attendant speaks no English and just says to me... full? And I shrug, admit defeat, and say ja, full. It occurred to me later that he actually said "voll", the German word for full, which which is pronounced just like "full". Ha. So I guess Hertz was getting their hybrid back with 45 euros of premium gas in it. Whatever, we were already passed the time we were supposed to have it returned by! By the way, the nice attendant actually pumped the gas for me - that is common in Germany.

My return instructions just said "main train station" with a few details with what to do with your receipt from the gas station. We arrive at the main station, as you can imagine, we're in the city center and there's a ton of traffic... we have no idea where to put the car and don't see Hertz anywhere. Andy finally figures we should put it in the parking garage... so I pull into train station parking and that's when we see the tiniest little sign for Hertz I've ever seen, lol. We follow the signs and park on the 8th floor, grab all our stuff and go into the main train station. That's when we find stands for every rental car company except Hertz.... Andy finally calls them and the representative just told us to give our keys to the Deutsche Bahn workers. So we actually just had to go to a normal ticketing/customer service area and just hand off our keys to the lady at the desk... seems super odd. But, it's been a week now and my credit card hasn't been charged for an entire car yet, so I guess it worked! Here's our little putt putt; I was sad to say goodbye.

Even though we were having some of the worst weather we've had this entire trip, we were excited to be in Nuremberg! Quite a few of the sites from Nazi history that we've learned about in grade school/high school and then again in all the museums and tours in Berlin are actually located in Nuremberg. It's the home of the trials and the famous rally grounds where Hitler planned to build stadiums and parade/festival grounds of epic proportions. It was also in Nuremberg that we stayed in arguably the best hostel we've ever stayed in. It was all worth walking in the rain for.