We drove from Nuremburg to Rothenburg ob der Tauber and I wanted to take the Romantic Road (Romantische Strasse) but after putting our destination into our Audi A6 GPS, we ended up on the A7. So something must have gone wrong there but we still ended up in Rothenburg ob der Tauber so I was glad.
Arriving earlier in the morning gave us more time to roam around the town which we needed. It was raining the whole day which was rather inconvenient but it doesn’t change the beauty of the town. It is very difficult not to fall in love with the old town if you love old heritage style buildings. The old town has a lot of medieval designed houses, fort wall, coble stone roads, Bavarian and Franconian food.
We couldn’t check into our hotel yet but we left our bags with them. Check- in was at the restaurant area. There was parking at the back of the guesthouse but spaces were limited.
Our hotel is in a great spot right in the middle of the town hall platz. We went into the tourist centre to grab a map and learnt that there were a few English walking tours we could sign up for. The next English tour was scheduled at 2pm in front of the old town hall. The walking tour went around the old town and it was slightly up to the guide. We were brought to many historic sites and our guide is a local lady who provided many insight information to area and Rothenburg ob der Tauber. I highly recommend going for the tour for 9Euro.
We spotted these muffin looking pastries outside our hotel and since it was too early for dinner and too late for lunch, we decided to a snack and bought a chocolate “muffin” instead. It wasn’t a muffin but a local specialty called a Schneeball. It was quite hard almost like a biscuit texture. Schneeball or snowball in English is a deep fried shortcrust pastry dusted with icing sugar or coated with chocolate. Given it is a special dish from Rothenburg ob der Tauber, I was glad we get to taste it.
After the tour, we went around on our own going up to the wall (free of charge) and we walked a small section on the wall. We saw many plaques with people or companies who had donated to maintaining the wall. The “m” on the plaque means how many meters are covered with the donation.
We had also covered some common photo hot spots as well.
We made our way back to the hotel to check in and our room, while simple was enough for 1 night. We walked around to find a place for dinner as our hotel unfortunately was closed for the night for dinner. We ended up at Hotel Reichsküchenmeister restaurant after a walk.
Our last activity for the day is the Night Watchman Tour. I highly recommend this tour as the guide dressed up as a night watchman and although it was only 1 hour, it was packed with a lot of information and best of all, our guide was very witty and he made the tour very interesting. The tour only cost 8Euro.
Another speciality of this town is Kathe Wohlfahrt Christmas decoration shop. Rothenburg ob der Tauber is where the main store is and there are many others in Germany. The shop claims to open all year round and has a very wide variety of Christmas decorations. We visited one of the stores and if you are a Christmas decoration lover, you can spend hours in the shop or shops.
I really like Rothenburg ob der Tauber and I would definitely want to visit this place again if I returned to Germany.
