Because just one day on the Romantic Road was not enough stress. 😉 We started off the day hopeful that we would not have a repeat of our experiences on the road from the day before. The weather was much better, which was a big improvement! We left the castle by 8.30, just to allow a bit of extra time!
There were sunflowers AND purple flowers at the side of the road. Too pretty! 🙂
But moving on. 😉 We went straight to Nordlingen, our next stop on the Romantische Strasse. This medieval town is in an old crater; perfect for the round wall! This is the inside of the wall, still completely intact.
You can also walk right round the town inside the old wall:
It was a pretty little town, but hardly anybody was around first thing on a Sunday morning!
We moved on along the Romantic Road. We hadn’t been on it long before there was a sign with a red X showing that the B25 road ahead was closed, but it wasn’t a big problem as it had detour signs. We now could add another German word to our road vocabulary: Umleitung = Detour, in addition to Einfahrt (Entrance) and Ausfahrt (Exit). Halte and Stop we already knew. 😉
We followed the detour signs and were back on the road again. We soon came to a T junction in a small village and didn’t know which way to go; there were no Romantic Road signs in sight. So we guessed. Our guess was wrong. 😉 So we drove around a bit and somehow found ourselves back on the right road. But not for long. Unbelievably the same B25 road was closed again a bit further on. And this time there were no Umleitung signs. So we relied on the GPS and it wasn’t long until we came to this:
Halte! Stop! Achtung! Etc.. Not again! The road was closed. So we turned around and the lovely GPS directed us onto this road instead:
Here we go again, we thought! We got stuck in road after road that were closed around a small town.
By this time we had had quite enough of the Romantische Stressor and we decided just to use the motorways to go to the villages we wanted to go to instead. Every single village, every one we went through, was so gorgeous, cute and romantic anyway:
So there didn’t seem much point in following the Romantic Road, so called! Mike decided that maybe some places had paid to be put onto the route!
We stopped and got some gas. While Mike was paying, there was another tourist in there who had also been following the Romantische Strasse and had got lost! There was some comfort in knowing it wasn’t just us!
Next stop: Dinkelsbuhl.
What a cute little place!
Dinkelsbuhl was established in the 1300s. Unlike Nordlingen, Dinkelsbuhl was teeming with life:
There was even an organ grinder making music:
Clearly it was their Sunday market day and we enjoyed the atmosphere:
After wandering around for a bit, we walked back through one of the old entry ways to the car.
And then we went to Rothenberg. And I’m delighted to report that there was nothing rotten about it! 🙂
We went in through the old city wall.
Through another medieval archway with another ancient wall around the town:
The tower with the windows going up reminded us very much of something we’d seen before, at Biltmore Estate in North Carolina:
Just such a pretty place, old is everywhere you look. Just as well I didn’t see any mirrors. 😉
I loved the typeface in this old Bible that was displayed in an antique shop’s window:
And at the opposite end of the scale, in tourist shops was the German version of the Mozart rubber ducks, complete with beer in hand:
I was also amused that the label says “handmade”. Really? How?!!! The pig above them has the right expression. 😉
After Rothenberg we put in the address for our next accommodation near Wertheim and off we went. This time, not on lovely little roads, but… on the Autobahn. We were going the fastest we’ve ever been in a car, at 140kph and in the SLOW lane, and cars were just whizzing past us in the other two lanes. Crazy! Mike called them the suicide lanes! There is no speed limit. It occasionally went down to 120, and then you’d see this sign:
Which meant you didn’t do just 120kph any more, it was a free for all and you were on a race track again!!!
There are quite a lot of wind mills and solar energy panels here. We saw “farms” of solar panels at the side of the Autobahn:
We got to our accommodation just on dusk, this was the view from the balcony:
This was a very nice change from the madness of the Autobahn!!!
HI Mike and Lynette,
You observe well, I love your photos, stories and humour! Be aware on the autobahn in Holland: 130 is the limit, but more often 120! I trust your GPS won’t find road blocks in Holland and will take you straight to Emmeloord! See you tonight!
Janny
I enjoyed your stories of the Romantic Road and realised I hadn’t warned you because I assumed you knew….all the commentary says the road itself is not pretty or worth following. We used ‘it’ – little but mainly used the autobahn to quickly get to whichever cute (and sometimes not so cute) place on the road we had decided to visit next. We also visited nordlingen but for about 20 minutes. It was also mainly deserted and then it started to rain…very hard. So that is why the wall photos you saw from my Journey were from a different town (Rothenburg). Which is not deserted!!
Now she tells me. Ha! 😉 Hey, we had to learn some things the hard way! All the places we chose to stop were good, but yeah, the signage was really bad. We’d still be lost if it wasn’t for the GPS!!! We’ve now learned that Germany is known for it’s constant construction and deconstruction of roads! 🙂 Dinkelsbuhl was my favourite of the towns!