As the Wind Blows

Germany is beautiful in autumn. I know I said London was beautiful in autumn but so is Germany. Any country with deciduous trees is beautiful in autumn. And really the countryside needed to beautiful otherwise I would have gone mad as we spent most of the time in the coach throughout Germany. Seriously on the second day we only spent an hour and a half out of the coach and that was on the Rhine River cruise (ignoring stopping for lunch). Our poor bus driver Bernard must have been exhausted from all that concentration.

I went on an ocean cruise last year and I prefer them to river cruises. I don’t know if it was because it was a cold grey day, but I just didn’t enjoy the boat ride down the Rhine. Maybe if I had been below deck away from the wind instead standing on the highest part of the deck where it was the windiest, or maybe if I had sat down instead of standing up for the whole journey, or maybe if I had worn warmer clothing or maybe it was because the scenery was just so repetitive...

‘Oh there’s a cute little village with a castle on top of a nearby mountain!!!
 Oh there’s another cute village with a castle on top of a nearby mountain!
 Oh, there’s another cute village with a castle on top of a nearby mountain.
 Oh there’s . . . . I wonder when this boat ride will end, my face is frozen.’

The Romantic Road is a road through Bavaria. I suppose romantic would be the term used to describe the scenery that one observes whilst travelling down the road, as opposed to the road itself, which I’m assuming is meant to have green hills and cute fairytale like villages. However the day that we were travelling down this road it was unbelievably foggy so the most that you could see were the headlights of the cars from the other direction. At least it gave us weary travellers time to catch 40 winks after the previous exhausting day of resting our posteriors for a prolonged period of time on the coach.

The title to my journal entry when I was last in Bavaria mentioned fairytale castles. Well on this second visit I went to fairytale town. Now the pictures aren’t as picturesque (...) as they would have been in summer, but just being in Rothenberg by the Tauber River with its castle walls, towers, cobblestone streets and triangular roofed houses was like being in another world. The rest of the world must have thought so too because after it was bombed in WW2 by the English, donations supposedly came from all over the world to pay for the reconstruction.
 
To add to the romantic atmosphere there were hallowed out pumpkins all around the town (probably to mark Halloween) and this little town is meant to be one of the places where the Christmas markets are held every year. I’d love to see the town covered in snow and then go and roast some chestnuts on an open fire.

Although we didn’t have the best weather whilst I was in Germany, the countryside we passed by and the few places we stopped at were from the pages of fairytales.