Rothenburg, Germany

It was a noisy night. The charming clock tower rang every hour and you can’t imagine how loud cars sound on cobble roads. We vowed to keep the small TV on the next night!

We enjoyed a European breakfast (ham, cheese, yogurt, bread, cereal) in the bakery and made plans for another self-guided walking tour, led by the awesome tour guide – ME!















Our first stop was the Medieval Crime & Punishment museum. Torturing by tickling and iron masks for women who talked too much were a few of the items that captured our attention.

We then made our way to the Rathaus (City Hall) and climbed to the top of the Town Hall Tower. This remarkable pieced of architecture is over 700 years old (and it feels like it’s 700 hundred years old when you are climbing the small wooden steps) and has no foundation of its own as it sits directly on top of another building. We were fools and climbed the extremely narrow and steep steps to the top of the tower and squeezed through a very small hole in the top to a magnificent view of the town. We stood in the place where former sentries watched over Rothenburg. After climbing back down, we decided that the site was worth the scary climb.

The next stop on my tour was Kathe Wohlfahrt Weihnachtsdorf (Christmas village) to purchase a few ornaments and learn about the history of many of our Christmas traditions, such as ornaments, Santa Clause, and Christmas cards.

We then spent some time in St. Jakob’s Church, which is famous for an altar that contains a relic – a drop of Christ’s blood. The altar is a gorgeous wood sculpture of the Last Supper.

A little further along in our walking tour we stopped for lunch. It was cold outside, so I ordered Goulash Soup. My dad ordered what he thought to be chicken but was really fish (Pollack isn’t Poultry and he didn’t ask for the translation) and my mom ordered a Sausage Salad which turned out to be strips of cheese and bologna.

The Old Rothenburg Craftsman’s House showed us how a crafter and his family lived in the 1200’s. There were 11 rooms with original tools and furnishings. From this house it is easy to see how much smaller and shorter people were back in the medieval days. Days were short and so were ceilings and beds.

Stopping into small shops, sampling Rothenburg’s famed “Schneeballe” (coated balls of pastry strips) and other bakery goods, and searching for souvenirs filled the rest of our day.

A late dinner was at a traditional Franconian restaurant, Gasthaus Glocke. We each ordered something different and ate EVERYTHING! My dad enjoyed his “Light” beer while my mom and I thoroughly enjoyed the wine sampling basket of 5 different wines each that were brought to us in small baskets. We enjoyed the wine so much, that I bought a bottle.

The great day was topped off with ice cream sundaes at a cute little café we had visited earlier in the trip here. We went back to our room and fell asleep with the TV on, hoping to drown out some of the outside noise.