We began our day early around 7 am. We had an awesome breakfast at our hotel. The experience was very different from what we expect in a buffet style breakfast in most hotels in America. We were served lovely coffee and breakfast at the table. We filled our bellies and hurried to the train station to catch the train to our next destination - Rothenburg. Packing light definitely gave us lot of mobility. Our bus arrived promptly to take us to the train station. In Germany the buses are very punctual. At each bus stop it shows you in exactly how many minutes your bus would arrive. If it says 2 minutes, without any doubt your bus will show up in 2 minutes.
As we settled down in our first class compartment in Eurail we were impressed. With 5 hours to kill, Rakesh got busy with reading the Rick Steve's travel book and I started to pen down our travel diary. Unfortunately we could not carry a laptop as that would add too much weight to our baggage and so I had write my travel diary. It was kind of a pain.
We reached Rothenburg at around 2 pm and met up with bhaiya and bhabhi (Rishi and Minu) who had already reached there from India. It was great to see them in Germany. We had plans of visiting Germany and Italy with them.
Rothenburg ob der tauber is a beautiful walled town located on the banks of Tauber river. We entered the city through a beautiful gate and it was like stepping into a fairytale city. We walked through the maze of narrow cobbled streets to reach our B&B. The B&B was located in a central location and had a nice medieval touch. We dropped off our luggage and set out to explore the town.
Rothenburg is a picturesque medieval German town which is the best preserved medieval town in Germany with not much touch of modern times. Reminded us of Leavenworth near Seattle.
We walked to the market square which is the central "hang out" place in Rothenburg. There we climbed up 218 stairs to reach to the top of a clock tower to get an aerial view of the city. The view was magnificent with all the beautiful rooftops.
We spent the rest of the day strolling along the walls of the town and the cobbled streets. There were pastel colored buildings, houses, fountains, gardens, churches, watch towers etc at every corner of this town. Just like a fairytale town. We were loving the slow and relaxed pace of this charming town.
Next on the agenda was the Night Watchman tour at 8 pm. The Night Watchman tour is highly recommended in Rick Steve's book. The Night Watchman arrived at 8 PM sharp dressed in a cloak and a hat with a halberd and lantern. He was very funny and his comic style reminded us of our favourite comedian Jerry Seinfeld. He took us all over the town for an hour giving interesting historical details and stories with lots of humour. This guy has been doing these tours everyday at 8 pm for past 20 years. He thanked the American tourists for the booming tourism in Rothenburg. Overall he was witty and worth an hour of our valuable vacation time. So if you ever visit Rothenburg don't miss the tour. We loved it!
We missed seeing the crime museum as we were just enjoying outdoors.
Then we were craving some warm food so we picked a great Italian restaurant mentioned in the Rick Steve's book and had some amazing pasta/pizza and wine and called it a day.
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