Romantic Road

Saturday 5 April

We left the resort by 9:30 to drive along the “Romantic Road”, which really should be called a series of roads. Our first stop was at Schongau, a small but not impressive town, not a lot different from other small towns we had driven through during the week. Driving on we arrived a Landserg am Lech the old part of the town dominated by a large cobbled square with an impressive town gate and tower.

The next town was Augsburg founded over 2,000 years ago by the Roman Emperor Augustus and in the 15^th and 16^th centuries was a centre of banking and trading. The old Maximilianstrasse is lined with palaces and patrician houses and dominated at the end by St Ulrich’s church.

As the day was getting on and we wanted to get to Rothenburg for the night we decided to bypass several planned stops and drive on to Dinkelsbuhl a walled town with 16 towers and many of the original houses. During the evening the night watchman still makes his round of the city wall.

Rothenburg ob der Tauber is probably one of the best preserved medieval towns in Europe, it’s survival in its present form is due to two reasons, the first from the poverty inflicted on the town from the Thirty Year’s War in the 1600s which didn’t allow any major works for over two hundred years. The second from an American politician who had heard stories of the town from his mother who had visited the area before WW2.

Towards the end of the war a German general had occupied the town with orders not to surrender; the Americans had bombed parts of the town, not very accurately due to heavy cloud and were ordered to commence an artillery attack the next day. The American politician ordered that the town was not to be attacked and following negotiations with a German Major, the General being absent at the time, the Germans withdrew from the town. Today the entire area within the wall is a living museum of a medieval town and has been restored as a prosperous town due to the large numbers of visitors.

We arrived at Rothenburg around 5:00 and after booking into a Pension we walked around the old part of the town and after a delicious dinner in a basement German restaurant we joined the Night Watchman’s Tour for a talk on the town’s history while walking around in the rain.

Sunday 6 April

The morning was still very cold with rain threatening as we walked around the top of the town walls looking down on the houses; we were surprised at the size of the gardens at the rear of many, as from the street the houses appeared to be built right up to each other. Completing our walk by 11:00 we set off for Berlin a drive of around 550 km.

We had heard many stories of the speed people drive in Germany but that hadn’t prepared us for actually driving on the Autobahns. We started off at a sedate, for Germany, 120 km/hr. and the speed of cars passing made us appear to be parked in the service lane. As we gained confidence we raised our speed to 140 – 150 km/hr and at time 160, even then we were passed by cars as if we were standing still.

We learned very quickly that it was just as important to keep looking in the rear view mirror as straight ahead as cars that weren’t visible 30 seconds earlier would suddenly pass. We were very impressed with the courtesy of the drivers, it didn’t matter at what speed they were travelling as soon as they passed they moved back into the right lane. To further compound our difficulty in driving at speed in a right hand drive car, we also drove through several falls of snow; this probably reduced the average speed of cars on the road by 10 km/hr!

We have noticed while driving that many houses, barns and factories have their roofs covered with solar panels, but while driving yesterday and today we passed several banks of solar panels covering over a hectare, we also passed many hundreds of wind generators, one block alone Ann counted over 60.

We arrived at our accommodation in Berlin around 4:30, which after a 30 minute break for lunch was a remarkable or possibly frightening time to travel the distance. We have a small studio apartment with a kitchen, which at first impression was better than the one at the resort but on closer inspection we found that there is only two saucepans and no cooking utensils, this will challenge our skills to prepare meals.

As parking by the hostel was limited we decided to return the car early instead of waiting for Monday morning, the address we had was at the main railway station but it wasn’t indicated where to park the car. After driving around the station three times I eventually parked illegally and Ann went into the Europcar office for instructions. We could have driven for a week and we would never have found where to park the car.

We walked back to the hostel, stopping at a supermarket to shop, for the first time in our life we had to queue for over 15 minutes to get into the shop, the crowds inside were huge, and someone commented that it was the only one open on a Sunday in the area.

Monday 7 April

If we thought it was cold in the mountains in the snow, nothing prepared us for Berlin today, it was bitter. We walked down Friedrichstrasse to “Checkpoint Charlie” and then walked to the last remaining remnant of the Berlin Wall, nothing like the wall we viewed in 1986. The building on the west side of the wall had been demolished by the mid 1950s and which from 1933 to 1945 was the Gestapo, SS and Reich Security Main Office, the basement of which contained prison cells and the attic rooms where the Gestapo inflicted their savagery on many victims.

In 1986 the area was excavated and the cellars and foundations of the building were uncovered, this is now the site of an open air exhibition called the “Topography of Terror”, a pictorial exhibition of Nazi excesses in their years of control.

By 12:30 we were so cold that we decided the warmth of our room was more important than any further site seeing, so we returned and won’t be leaving till tomorrow.