Tuesday 20th September

Parking next to the river and letting Frankie have lovely views is all very well but it does stop the solar panel working and since the batteries were getting low we managed to wrangle a visit to Darren and Mandy’s van and had another fantastic evening swapping bullshit stories and drinking Federweisser.

Next morning I fed in some of the towns along our romantic route and off we went aiming for Rothenburg ob der Tauber. As you know, Stella has her own ideas of which way to go and since the brown signs were not as frequent as I expected we did travel down some odd roads but so far, after 50 miles or so, I can say that I am enjoying the drive. At this time of the year there is little traffic and we have been through some lovely countryside and past through some very scenic towns. I’ve had to let Lucy use my camera and I think she has been doing a wonderful job, it’s not easy framing a shot, focusing and missing the trees and poles whilst Frankie is hurtling along at 80mph. Above is Traberbischoffsheim, we didn’t stop but many of the churches in this area have very similar towers.

Along the route there was a bit of traffic, lots of banners and signs for parking so we pulled in and found a cross between the Ideal Home Exhibition, Dagenham Market and the Kursaal in Southend (as was).

Lucy is a dab hand and picking her way through the essential knick knacks that we need. In one of the tents were lots of home improvement stands and somehow we got talking to one of the stall holders. He said that my German was very pretty – he is now my favourite German ever.

Lucy found the sweet stand, as we knew she would. I nearly bought her a love heart with “Ich liebe dich” but she wasn’t interested. (I spelt checked and then double checked the writing on the love heart, it’s not my fault that your German ist nicht gut).

Another town, another lovely building, this is in Schaftersheim.

And here we are arrived in Rothemberg. The stellplatz takes 50 motorhomes (and one caravan), it has all the services plus toilets and is 100 yards from this part of the old wall of the town. It costs €10 per night, bit steep really but the town itself more than makes up for it. Our guidebook says that this place is tourist trap heaven and it is right but as one of the best preserved medieval towns in the world it can be forgiven.

Anywhere you point a camera will give you a pleasant photo.

Part of the city walls, over a mile long, you can walk the complete circuit.

We’re not sure if these displays are for the harvest or just a month early for Halloween.

I suspect it is the harvest, all the crops are reaching full maturity, the sunflowers have just turned there heads, sweetcorn is looking very healthy, roadside stalls are full of pumpkins and squashes and the surrounding fields are just full of food.

Pretty buildings with window boxes.

More pretty buildings. There are lots of shops and they have signs hanging outside. 

This really is a tourist place, it is full of Americans and Japanese (many of the shop signs are in Japanese) but I think it is worth visiting despite that.

Rothenburg is famous for Schneeball cakes, large round cakes and I’ve been given my orders to buy some tomorrow, it has been nearly three days since the last cake so about time I suppose.

The main square.

More buildings. So far we have only walked up and down the high street. We can see lovely buildings to the left and right of us and it is so difficult to know when to stop taking photos so this is an early warning that you should be getting more photos of this town tomorrow.

The butchers window full of preserved meats of all descriptions. Problem is we don’t know if you can eat it as is or you have to cook it and then if it does need cooking what you need to do. 

A couple of days ago I told you that I had bought some German cider and I can now let you know the results of my taste test. All I really need to say is that Germany isn’t very famous for it’s cider and that there is a very good reason for that – enough said, learn by my mistakes.