New romantics
We have spent the last few days travelling along Germany's Romantische Straβe – the Romantic Road – a tourist route from Füssen in the very south of Germany up to Würzburg, near Frankfurt. It is 385km long and links unspoilt villages, quaint towns, old castles and amazing churches down the middle of southern Germany. The traditional way to do this route is to start at Würzburg and work your way down so that it gets more beautiful and more impressive as you reach the mountains and the mighty Schloss Neuschwanstein. We, of course, aren't traditional and were coming from Austria so we sort of started at the "grand finale"…
That finale, as mentioned, is Schloss Neuschwanstein. This epic castle is the one you se
e on the front of all the German tourist guides. It's the one that Sleeping Beauty's castle at Disneyland is based on. It is a living, breathing cliché of a fairytale castle. And it is teeming with herds of annoying tourists. Like us. It is, of course, genuinely breathtaking. It perches, impossibly, up on a high crag overlooking the lakes in the valley below, being "buzzed" by dozens of paragliders like flies round a cow. Such is its might and presence that you have to feel slightly sorry for the "ordinary" Castle Hohenschwangau which gets literally overshadowed on the next hill.
We thought nothing could impress us after that but our next stop was Wieskirchen, an enormous church plonked
in the middle of a field. While it looks a bit plain on the outside, inside it is an eye-watering barrage of frescos and decorative stucco work. It is absurdly extravagant and it's hard to know where to look. Then we went to Rottenbuch and another church that, on the outside, looks a bit dull and insignificant. However, it has an even more mesmerising interior than Wieskirchen – a dazzling display of the most intricate mouldings, ornate sculpture and gaudy paint jobs achievable by human hand. It's like a fairground carousel has explod
ed in there.
We then visited a series of beautiful towns, each with their own medieval walls, van-destroying cobbled streets, half-timbered buildings and remarkable histories. One, Donauwörth, even has a monastery chapel that they claim contains remnants of Christ's crucifix. As a practising agnostic, it might as well claim to contain dragon teeth as far as I'm concerned. What they display, framed in gold on an enormous alter behind massive wrought-iron gates, looks like two tiny bits of bark. And it probably is.
I won't bore you wit
h descriptions of all the places we visited but I have to mention the amusingly named Dinkelsbühl. This must be the prettiest town on Earth. It was almost too pretty. I had to keep looking up to check we weren't somehow inside a giant snow-globe. Brightly-coloured houses, quaint streets, twee cafés, beautiful hotels, all inside a turreted wall – it's like a toy town – we could take no more. There was no way we could make it up to Würzburg, our eyes would bleed. We had to leave the Romantic Road. But there was one more stop we had to make…
Our sat-nav has had a lot of trouble in pronouncing the names of some of the places we've been visiting on this trip and it sometimes ends up sounding like the love child of Stephen Hawking and a Speak'n'Spell. So you can imagine the childish excitement we felt as we approached our last stop on the Romantic Road – Feuchtwangen. We giggled all the way to the French border.
A footnote on German campsites: Two phenomena have come to our attention while camping in Germany and both confuse me to the point where I start to feel faint.
The first is the trend for making your caravan a permanent fixture on a campsite. Now, to me, the attraction of having a caravan or motorhome is that one can take it to a whole host o
f new and interesting places. So why would you park it somewhere, grow a hedge around it, put a fence up, lay a patio next to it and while your at it, build an annex on the side of it. You have rendered your mobile home immobile – you might as well have just built a chalet.
The second is something that I never knew existed, something that I had never seen before in my life and something I have now seen two of. It is making my fingers feel funny just
thinking about typing the following words… HOTEL BUS. Yes, that's right. Want to go on a coach trip but don't want to worry what your hotel will be like each night? Simply tow your hotel around with you! I would love to have been at the meeting when that idea was floated.
That finale, as mentioned, is Schloss Neuschwanstein. This epic castle is the one you se
e on the front of all the German tourist guides. It's the one that Sleeping Beauty's castle at Disneyland is based on. It is a living, breathing cliché of a fairytale castle. And it is teeming with herds of annoying tourists. Like us. It is, of course, genuinely breathtaking. It perches, impossibly, up on a high crag overlooking the lakes in the valley below, being "buzzed" by dozens of paragliders like flies round a cow. Such is its might and presence that you have to feel slightly sorry for the "ordinary" Castle Hohenschwangau which gets literally overshadowed on the next hill.
We thought nothing could impress us after that but our next stop was Wieskirchen, an enormous church plonked
in the middle of a field. While it looks a bit plain on the outside, inside it is an eye-watering barrage of frescos and decorative stucco work. It is absurdly extravagant and it's hard to know where to look. Then we went to Rottenbuch and another church that, on the outside, looks a bit dull and insignificant. However, it has an even more mesmerising interior than Wieskirchen – a dazzling display of the most intricate mouldings, ornate sculpture and gaudy paint jobs achievable by human hand. It's like a fairground carousel has explod
ed in there.
We then visited a series of beautiful towns, each with their own medieval walls, van-destroying cobbled streets, half-timbered buildings and remarkable histories. One, Donauwörth, even has a monastery chapel that they claim contains remnants of Christ's crucifix. As a practising agnostic, it might as well claim to contain dragon teeth as far as I'm concerned. What they display, framed in gold on an enormous alter behind massive wrought-iron gates, looks like two tiny bits of bark. And it probably is.
I won't bore you wit
h descriptions of all the places we visited but I have to mention the amusingly named Dinkelsbühl. This must be the prettiest town on Earth. It was almost too pretty. I had to keep looking up to check we weren't somehow inside a giant snow-globe. Brightly-coloured houses, quaint streets, twee cafés, beautiful hotels, all inside a turreted wall – it's like a toy town – we could take no more. There was no way we could make it up to Würzburg, our eyes would bleed. We had to leave the Romantic Road. But there was one more stop we had to make…
Our sat-nav has had a lot of trouble in pronouncing the names of some of the places we've been visiting on this trip and it sometimes ends up sounding like the love child of Stephen Hawking and a Speak'n'Spell. So you can imagine the childish excitement we felt as we approached our last stop on the Romantic Road – Feuchtwangen. We giggled all the way to the French border.
A footnote on German campsites: Two phenomena have come to our attention while camping in Germany and both confuse me to the point where I start to feel faint.
The first is the trend for making your caravan a permanent fixture on a campsite. Now, to me, the attraction of having a caravan or motorhome is that one can take it to a whole host o
f new and interesting places. So why would you park it somewhere, grow a hedge around it, put a fence up, lay a patio next to it and while your at it, build an annex on the side of it. You have rendered your mobile home immobile – you might as well have just built a chalet.
The second is something that I never knew existed, something that I had never seen before in my life and something I have now seen two of. It is making my fingers feel funny just
thinking about typing the following words… HOTEL BUS. Yes, that's right. Want to go on a coach trip but don't want to worry what your hotel will be like each night? Simply tow your hotel around with you! I would love to have been at the meeting when that idea was floated.
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