Day 2: Driving the Romantic Road in Germany

Thursday, July 11, 2013:

Highlights of the day:

   What is the Romantic Road?

   Car rental: boom shakalaka

   Quick stop in Wurzburg

   My FAVORITE CITY: Rothenburg

   Sleeping in a freaking castle

   Robbie's sleep walks and talks, round 2

I might have figured out a way to get pics from my camera to here. It takes a long time and only works sometimes, so when I can do it, I'm only gonna add in a few for each post, but hopefully that'll help you see a glimpse of this amazing stuff!

First off, today was awesome because we got to rent a CAR! Do you know what that means? NO BACKPACKS! (Don't be scared for me. I realize that I'm two days in to a 45-day trip, through most of which I will be carrying that backpack. But hey, if I have a chance to put it down for a minute, I'm gonna!) But I'm getting ahead of myself. 

We checked out and took off to find our car rental place. (Sidenote, we are renting a car only until tomorrow because we are traveling the Romantic Road, a fancy name for the route between Frankfurt and Munich. It's "romantic" because it is dotted with really cute little Medieval villages that have beautiful, well-preserved buildings and cobblestone streets. So we decided to drive instead of train so we could stop wherever we wanted to. We ended up only hitting two towns this day and one tomorrow, so there are so many more we completely missed. But I think we hit the best ones :) side note finished).

Anyway, as we made our way to the car rental place, we felt so European stopping at the little bakery and buying little breads for breakfast as we walked. We felt even more European when we got lost and Robbie had his first All-German conversation to ask for directions! Woot woot! What a babe.

So funny thing about the car. We finally get there expecting something in decent shape but kinda ghetto.  Much to our surprise (and delight) we cruised out of town in an Audi S4. Boo yeah! We tried to act super cool, like we drive cars worth more than our annual income all the time, but our cover was blown when we couldn't even figure out how to start the car. Technology these days, I tell ya. Robbie refused to let me ask the employee (its a guy thing I guess) so eventually we figured it out and hit the Romantic Road.  

First stop: Wurzburg! This place is known for two things: its palace and its beer. Obviously we could only do one of those, but we figured hey, we'll see other palaces, right? Ha, psych. Our afternoon at the palace was beautiful. Apparently this is called the Versailles of Bavaria (this region of Germany), so it's pretty impressive. 

Also in Wurzburg we had our first picnic, and it was delicious! And under 5 euro! That's a steal. And since we are poor there will be many more of those to come.

Next stop: Rothenburg! 
This is my favorite place so far on this trip and might end up being my favorite place in Germany period. Picture a stone city wall filled with bright, colorful buildings with bright shutters and flower pots outside every single window and cobblestone roads connecting each home. Oh man, that seriously doesn't even do it justice. It is one of the most beautiful cities I've ever seen. We walked and walked (poor Robbie and his bum knee) all around and I was in heaven the whole time. 

We also decided to try this local dessert called Schneeballen. They were seriously in EVERY bakery window. They seemed fun, like little balls of shortbread and chocolate. Turns out they are not fun. Not fun at all. Yucky.

Before:

After:

Then we decided to splurge for dinner and had one of the most DELICIOUS meals I have had in my life. I might say that a lot on this trip, but seriously. I like food. We had Spätzle with noodles!  Basically pork steak in this amazing mushroom gravy sauce with homemade noodles. Ah, it's making my mouth water just thinking about it.  First real German full meal and worth every penny!

Finally after watching the sunset from the city wall, we headed to our sleeping quarters for the night, in a CASTLE! Whaaaaa? It was SO awesome! Well, mostly. When we got there our jaws dropped with how beautiful it was. Everything we saw made us love it even more, up the road, into the dark castle, up the old, creaky stairs, down the narrow hall, into our room, and then our wonder was a little overcome by worry. It turns out that when you book the "historic" room, they assume you want a bed made for midgets. I was okay, but poor Rob was way too tall for this beautiful, but extremely short canopy bed. We couldn't change bc they were booked so he had to sleep the night in the fetal position. Haha, whoops. My bad. The uncomfortable position may have contributed to tonight's round of sleep-walking and sleep-talking. However, this time he wasn't alone.

At around 3am (again), Robbie started dreaming that our castle had secret passageways and tunnels where little German children would hide and sneak into people's rooms to steal their money. He literally got out of bed and checked the back of the closet to make sure there was no secret entrance. He also started counting our money to make sure they hadn't come while he was sleeping. Haha, oh man. So then he couldn't go back to sleep and happened to be awake when I (yes, Angie, the sane one) started talking in my sleep! What?! This marriage is doing crazy things to my brain. 

So here's the story from Robbie's perspective. So Angie started mumbling incoherently, and then the first words I could understand out of her mouth were "I sleep during the day...I fly during the night..." At this point I thought she was possessed, until I heard the next line; "And sometimes they poop." That's when I knew that this was just Angie talking. I couldn't help but laugh out loud, which woke Angie up. As she woke up she realized what she had said and started laughing herself! We laughed for the next 5 minutes while laying in that midget bed at 3:00 am. Apparently, Angie had been dreaming that her friend April's little boy kept eating bat droppings. So she was trying to make bats sound really scary and disgusting so that Simon would stop eating their poop. So she was actually saying, "They sleep during the day... They fly during the night... And sometimes they poop." It was hilarious. And now I'm handing the reins back to Angie.

So that was our second day in Europe. Auf Wiedersehen for now! Tomorrow, finish the Romantic Road to Munich!