My Favorite Day! Heidelberg Castle and Burg Elz!!
9.04.2017
We had a lot of fun and laughed until our sides hurt today! We woke up at 7am, ate breakfast and were on our way. We got to Heidelberg by 10 and Robin drove down a very NARROW 1 way street-- yes, going the WRONG direction, looking for the underground parking garage! We finally found it (after asking for directions) and headed toward the funicular that took us up a steep slope to the top of the hill where the castle is. We looked around for a bit on the grounds and then took an hour guided tour that was very interesting. We told our guide that our 9th great grandfather Johan Conrad Heninger worked at the castle as the head Tailor in the 1600's and she called one of her colleagues to come and speak with us. This lady was super nice (Barbara) and gave us a little tour of where it is thought that he probably worked. After the tour, we poked around a bit longer and went to the gift shop and then walked over to the gardens and decided to head to the old town and do some shopping. Robin and I needed to find a bank to get more Euro-- finally found one after walking for several blocks! Then we walked up and then back down the long street of shops. (There were many streets, we just walked down one of them!) Allison and I wanted to find a charm of the Heidelberg Castle-- we actually did, but the Jewelry Shop was CLOSED... NO! We walked back to the car tired out from all the walking we did! Then I drove the 2 hours to Burg Elz. We ran into a lot of construction on the freeway and it really held us up. We finally arrived at the parking for Burg Elz Castle (AKA Snow White Castle) after a lot of narrow and very windy roads! (Crazy hair pin turns!) The scenery was breathtaking though and each valley and small town was so picturesque with the church steeple and homes built around it! Every single town was like this that we passed through! After we parked, we found the walking path down to the Castle- it took us a while to get down to it! We walked downhill for about 25 minutes and we turned a corner and there it was! The brush cleared and there it was in it's glory! We took a bunch of pictures as we got closer. We walked up to the gate and found out they actually open to the public (we thought it was privately owned) and do tours, but that it had closed about an hour earlier!! Darn!! The castle sits on a hill with a valley below it with the River Elz running by it-- hence the name of the castle. It was just so beautiful and so quaint and cute! This is probably my #1 favorite castle now! We walked up the shorter but steeper path back to the car only taking about 15 minutes this time. It took 2 more hours of very windy roads and small towns that all looked the SAME to get to our hotel tonight! It really felt like we were going in circles and that we would never find our hotel, BUT!! Cool thing, we got to cross a river (not sure which one but it was a wide one-- either the Rhine itself or a tributary to it) on a ferry with our car! (And I was driving!) I've never done that before-- pretty cool! We laughed and joked the whole way to our hotel! We arrived about 9:30 to the Schlangenbader Hotel. We are up in the hills of what looks like might be a resort town-- it was already dark when we got there. We are in the town of Schlanganbad. No on was at the desk when we arrived so we had to flag the lady down. (We named her Helga, because we don't know her real name.) And, there are no restaurants open and we were all so hungry. My snacks came in handy yet another night here in Germany!! It was a really fun day and we had so many funny things happen! We realized that the reason it took so long coming back from Berg Elz was because we hit the scenic route on the GPS instead of the quickest route! Ugh! Yeah, we laughed about that for the rest of our trip! We also laughed at all the funny German words...pictures of some of this below!
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