We arrived in Wurzburg early this morning, the capital of Franconia. Guten morgen (good morning). It has 52 churches, and only one of the churches was never destroyed. It looks like a Greek Orthodox Church, but it’s not, most of the people are Catholic. Instead of touring the city, we jumped on a bus and drove 1.5 hours to Rothenburg. Our guide today was quite good (Caroline from Ireland). The road we took is called the romantic road, but to be honest I cannot remember why. It was a foggy morning, as we drove through the countryside. One interesting point is that so many of the houses have solar panels. Germany’s goal is to be off nuclear, and only use alternative forms of energy by 2020. We saw many wind turbines as well (but on our ride back after the fog lifted). I forgot to mention, there were only 70 of the 170’passengers going to Rothenburg today, so we only needed 2 buses. When we were booking our excursions, we weren’t sure about Rothenburg because of the bus ride, but joy and Bowman were going and the rest of us figured we’d go too. But John and Bowman weren’t on our bus. We saw them getting on another bus, the wrong one. George went to find them, and for some reason, they weren’t on the list.  But joined us anyway. Later they found out that they never registered for this excursion. Too funny, but good that we also saw them before it was too late.

Many of the fields had been harvested already. Sugar beets are the predominant vegetable grown here. Coca Cola is the biggest buyer of the beets. But we also saw corn and potatoes. It was unusual not to see any sheep, goats, cows along the way, but the farmers keep their animals inside because the land is so fertile, they don’t want to waste a bit of it on the animals.

Rothenburg, is actually a city because it has 12,000 residents. Anything over 10,000 is a city. Roth means red and burg means castle. FYI – berg means hill or mountain. All of the houses in the city have red roofs, which is where the Roth comes from. The city has a fortification wall around the city, for three miles. We walked along some of the wall, but not three miles. It was narrow, high and a little scary for mom and I. The wall, on a map, actually looks like the shape of Pinnocchio’s head. The view of the countryside from Pinnocchio’s nose and the gardens was gorgeous. There were many other tour groups there other than us within the walled city. There were numerous shops, a beautiful square, churches, a torcher museum, clock towers, suit of armor store and an enormous Christmas shop (Kathee Wohlfahrt). The Christmas shop was fun at first, but then it became a little overwhelming. And everything was really expensive. Picture over 30,000 traditional German Christmas decorations. Wow.

Our guided tour of the city wasn’t very long. Then we had over an hour to tour on our own. Mom and I only got lost once. I was fascinated by the signs.Hotel signs, store signs, mostly wrought iron and gold. There were also many fountains throughout the city, all connected thru underground pipes. We met back up with the group for lunch where we had a traditional German lunch – potatoe soup, bratwurtz, mashed potatoes, sauerkraut, and apple streudel. It was delicious, and quite filling. After lunch we boarded the bus for Wurzburg.

In Wurtzburg, we went to the palace, which is actually called the Wurzburg Residence, and the residence of the prince bishops. It was enormous. The frescos painted on the ceilings at the main staircase depicted the four continents, and what was unusual was the three dimensional sculptures that came out of the painting. Like a leg of an angel.  Portions of the castle were destroyed in WWII, but the Nazis removed many of the pictures and furniture beforehand, so much was saved. It is a UNESCO world heritage site because the center was not destroyed.

After the tour, mom and I took the bus back to the ship, but about half of our group,walked through the city and down to the boat. For dinner we celebrated Carol’s birthday and Nancy and John’s anniversary.