The Romantic Road: The Ultimate Couples Road Trip in a Fairytale Land.
For the last few days, Tom, Tess and I have been driving our motorhome, Youdle, along Germany’s Romantische StraBe – otherwise known as The Romantic Road. This is a beautiful route where castles sprout like mushrooms, all cities are walled – as if preparing for the Roman invasion, and cobblestones whisper their secrets under your feet. It’s the ultimate route for those who love fairy tales, history and of course, schnitzel; and there’s plenty of all three to be had!
We began, like most people who travel this route, in Wurzburg, a large city that snuggles against the banks of the Main River and is home to the Wurzburg residence. This baroque palace was built in 1720 but was decimated during World War II when Allied bombing left only 10 percent of it standing. Today it has been painstakingly rebuilt and is a faithful representation of its pre-war grandeur.
Simultaneously both intimidating and fabulous, the Wurzburg residence just begs to be photographed from every angle. It is flawless, impressive, majestic – a place designed to make adjectives pointless as none fit its magnificence. Its facade is massive – as if its trying to see how much prime city centre space it can take up and knows its worth the cost of every square inch. The endless rows of windows give you the sense that you are being watched by the eyes of a Goddess as you peruse the gardens below.
It’s free entry into the gardens – one thing I love about Germany is that they don’t charge for everything and culture is available to everyone. There’s a peaceful, wooden walkway scattered with benches, vast shaded pools with gorgeous ornate fountains filled with incomprehensible statuary, and huge flower beds stuffed with flowers and bushes so manicured they look like they’ve stepped out of a flower-salon.
We only visited the gardens as travelling with Tess means that we can never go inside these places. I like to think that inside you would find beautiful modelesque Goddesses draped in floating silks, lounging demurely on diamond thrones, drinking only the finest nectar made by a stable of rare pet bees and eating exquisite things, schnitzel perhaps?
I must digress here for a moment to discuss schnitzel: a revelation to a lapsed vegetarian like myself. Flattened chicken, breaded and deep fried to the point where it’s a golden, crispy bite of heaven. It sounds like a chicken nugget variant. It’s not. I don’t know what the Germans do to it but it’s delicious.
The Residence aside, I wasn’t too impressed with Wurzburg. Its blend of ancient and modern left me wishing for the uncompromising beauty of Bruges. But our next stop was Rothenburg ob der Tauber, a place recommended by everyone and which we were highly anticipating.
The Romantic Road has motorhome service areas outside every town – these are places where you can park your motorhome within a few minutes walk of the town and can stay for as long as you want. There are facilities to empty and fill up your van and electrical hook up should you need it. They cost from 8 – 12 Euros for 24 hours and are one of the many things we love about Germany. Rothenburg had three of these huge motorhome parks on the edges of the town so it was easy to find a spot to park.
The first thing that strikes you as you enter Rothenburg is that the whole city looks like a castle. The walls are tall and made of ancient sand-coloured stone that bears the marks of time but are remarkably well preserved. The road we followed flows through an arched entrance through one of the many towers and I got honked at as I stood, camera in hand, going full tourist in the middle of it. The towers mark the entrance points to the city and are linked by walls you can walk along. The entire route is over 5 km and takes you around the whole circle of the city providing beautiful views of the ancient, cobbled streets and the buildings with their red slate roofs and stepped facades.
Inside the walls, the half-timbered shops and houses look like they were built by a gingerbread maker. They are as brightly painted as children’s toys and seem to lean forward as if eager to glimpse the tourists below. Plants and flowers and vines play their part, adding a huge variety of greens and reds giving the place a Tinsel Town, Santa Claus vibe even before you reach the Christmas shop.
Everything is designed to please the tourist. There is shop upon shop selling beautiful souvenirs, sausages, cakes, coffees and hte window displays are works of art themselves making you want to dive into each shop to explore the wonders behind each window.
We stopped at a cafe to try The famous Rothenburg schneeballen, or snowball. Well, it definitely looked like a snowball, made of pastry pieces and fried before being dipped in sugar. But whilst a snowball makes you think of something light and fluffy and delicate, this was dense and solid – the sort of snowball thrown by the school bully. Perhaps they should be renamed kanonenkugels – cannonballs. They were, however, the only disappointment in Rothenburg.
As it began to get busy, we left the main streets around the centre of Rothenburg and headed out towards the walls to explore the outer reaches and I am so glad we did. Not only were there very few tourists away from the centre, but I felt we saw the authentic Rotheburg, the Rothenburg that has performed on the stage earlier in the day and has now put on a dressing gown and taken off its makeup. Here, on the walls, built in the 14th and 15th century, you could feel the age of the town like a physical presence. We walked the outskirts, sometimes on the walls, often below them, where they suddenly opened into peaceful little gardens stuffed with herb beds where we could let Tess off her lead for a run around. Ancient fountains and statues and centuries old stone benches stood quietly in these gardens, unadmired by the visitors who stayed in the hive of the centre. We sat for a while, just drinking it all in, and feeling like we were welcome visitors to a beautiful fairytale.
We visited a few more towns on the Romantic Road: Dinkelsbuhl, which was a bit like Rothenburg – very pretty – but without the magic and varnish; and Nordlingen which has a wall you can walk fully around. Both seemed more honest than Rothenburg – beautiful places but catered around residents rather than purely aimed at tourists – however, we felt like we’d seen the best the road had to offer. Besides, the voice of the Black Forest, which had been whispering to me since we entered Germany, was becoming impossible to ignore. I wanted to return to the fairytale, the twisted dark fairytale this time, and lose myself in its forests like a character from an old tale.
