Germany: Rothenburg, May 11 Part 1

After an invigorating night's sleep, Brandon and I awoke somewhat early on Sunday to pack for our first road trip. We loaded our bags into the hot sweaty car, and Brandon took a few minutes to prepare his Tom-Tom. Generally speaking, this navigation system was quite impressive, most notably for the fact that the voice belonged to Mr. T. That's right, Mr. T joined us for the remainder of the week, telling Brandon "to enter the motorway" or "in 300 meters, turn left" or "slow it down, fool, slow it down!" Seriously, entertainment in the simplest form.

We set off to Rothenburg, a small medieval town that is magical, quaint and peaceful. A wall runs completely around the town. We walked a good part of it in order to see the town from a higher view. This is probably my best photo of the wall itself.


Rothenburg exists solely for tourism, and we somehow picked one of the best days to play tourist here - thank you travel gods and karma! We happened upon the town for Medieval Parade Weekend. The townspeople draped themselves in medieval lederhosen and wandered the streets with the aim to entertain. Numerous townfolk could be found on horseback...







...or walking with dead animals on shovels...















... or firing off cannons. The Medieval Parade element was really a quite fun surprise for our day of tourism.






Some other highlights during the day in Rothenburg included an amazing lunch of a summer salad with fresh fruit and fresh veggies, followed by a gelato dessert. Real authentic gelato is perhaps one of my favorite foods in Europe, and it was definitely enjoyable on this beautiful day. Rothenburg is also famous for Christkindlmarkts - those stores that exist solely for Christmas 365-24-7 (which we all know I don't fully support, but tourism is tourism). These shops and stores were on nearly every corner. The architecture of the buildings here was also quite impressive. All in all, Rothenburg was significantly amazing.