If you've read parts 1-6, you're probably thinking that I'm just a natural writer. "I'm not." And that it must just come easy to me. "It doesn't."
It's at this point of a project that the procrastination sets in and we teeter on whether or not the story will even get finished. Funny ... but true! If you look back at the previous trip on this website, from 2018 (I mean, that should tell you something there ... 8 years ago!!!), there were lots more photos and info that I never got around to sharing from our trip out west. We had a terrific time in Death Valley, and Alabama Hills, and even on the ride home. sigh.
So maybe I'll just delete these paragraphs and get my head back in the game ... to our next stop in Germany. Or maybe I'll leave them, because this is definitely part of my struggle! As is spelling that dang word "definitely." (Thank you again, spell check!)
Okay, back to it! Even though the writing may be getting me down, the excitement and feelings of adventure from the trip are still quite alive and kicking! haha!
After an early breakfast, at the hotel in the Black Forest, we were on the bus by 8:30 for our two and a half hour drive to Heidelberg! The Heidelberg castle sits up on the side of the Königstuhl hillside (photos above) and overlooks the town and the Neckar River, a tributary of the Rhine. I think this was the first time I felt most like we were in "old" Germany. I loved the city!
We met up with our local tour guide for the day (the gentleman in yellow), who was full of information and funny stories about the town and castle. He was really quite entertaining. One thing that I appreciate Gate 1 Travel has just started doing is that they now include the tips for the local guides when they are paid. That is a tremendous help because it's hard to plan your money, not knowing how many local guides there will be on a tour. This was the first time (that I've experienced) those fees were covered. It made the individual city tours flow so much better I thought and we never had to worry if we were tipping too much or not enough. Farid took care of it for us!
Our entry to the tram ride and castle were included in our plans already, so Farid gave us our tickets and we boarded the railway tram to head up the mountain. I did take photos of that on our way back down, so you'll see them in a bit.
I'm not going to include a bunch of historical facts about these places, because well, there are hundreds of years of history here. But the overview from Wikipedia says that these castle ruins are among the most important Renaissance structures north of the Alps. The earliest castle structure was built before 1214 and after two lightning bolt fires, another fire, and damage from wars over the years, by 1880 Mark Twain mentioned it as a ruin.
Today the castle is protected and has more than a million visitors a year! Seeing the city from the castle was magnificent. It was fun to imagine how lively and busy the castle must have been back in its heyday.
In the photo below, you can also see the Old Bridge across the river, which we walked to later in the tour.
I don't know who designed these soldiers' outfits, but .... hmmm?
Watch those teeth from the drop down gate above!
A little door for deliveries maybe? haha!
This is a memorial above one of the castle doors to honor a castle architect's two young sons who died while on the construction site.
This gate below was designed especially as a 19th birthday present to Friedrich V's young wife, Elizabeth Stuart, in 1615. According to legend, it was assembled over night and presented in the morning as a gate entrance for her private garden. Also, the story is that Elizabeth loved animals, so Friedrich had the artisans carve all sorts of animals into the right column. There are none on the left side. We easily found a couple right away.
This building behind us (above) is Friedrich's Wing in the courtyard of the castle grounds. The builder, Friedrich IV, was displaying an idealized form of the royal family's ancestral hall and demonstrating to his contemporaries his claim to power. According to the internet, for preservation purposes, the sculptures on the facade were replaced with replicas around 1900. The original figures are now located indoors, in the Friedrich’s Wing.
Anyone thirsty? This gigantic wine barrel (below) is one of two massive wine storage units in the castle underground. The one further down the stairs is even larger ... it could hold 220,000 liters (58,124 gallons) of wine and even had a platform built on top of it... likely a dance floor. haha!
Leaving the castle, we took the vertical railway tram back down the mountain, and this time we got to stand near the front of the tram, which was a great view! It was pretty steep actually!
Back down with the peasants in the city (haha), we walked through town and out to the Old Bridge. Since 1788, the bridge has connected the Old Town with the Neuenheim district on the other side of the Neckar River. After being bombed in WWII, the bridge was rebuilt and opened again in 1947. These two white towers were part of the bridge gate, that used to be connected to a city wall in the Middle Ages.
The bridge monkey used to be a stone figure, but is redone in bronze today. His head is hollow so you can actually stick yours inside, like a mask. But it's said that those who touch the coin will come into money, so that's where I preferred to stand. haha!
Below is the Jesuit Catholic Church, built between 1712 and 1759. I wasn't expecting it to be so bright white inside!
After our tour of the castle and the walk through the city, it was about lunch time! I think these tours require you to walk so much because you're also going to be eating and drinking so much! We had three hours of "free time" in the afternoon so that we could eat at our choice of restaurant, and shop, and explore Heidelberg some more on our own. Two of the ladies in our group went with Jim and I to lunch and we all four ordered "kids meals!" haha! But honestly, it was quite a bit. I got sausages and potatoes; the other three got fish sticks and salads. It was a lot of food! And I wanted to save room for dessert ... ice cream or a bakery treat maybe while exploring the town. ;-)
After lunch, Jim and I just wandered around, stopped by a bakery (or two), popped in a Christmas store so I could buy a local ornament (these were my only souvenir purchases), and ran by the ATM for some more euros. Boy those euros go fast! haha!
Before long it was time to meet up with the group again and get back on the bus to head to nearby Mannheim where we'd be staying for two nights. That last photo of the pink building was just an eye-catching house I photographed from the bus window.
For some reason I didn't photograph our hotel room in Mannheim. I wasn't really "sold on" the city, or the hotel, until the last few hours of our last night there, which you can read about a little way further down. I was thinking Gate 1 had messed up and should have let us stay in Heidelberg for the night, not at this cookie-cutter Radisson hotel, which I could have found in any major city back in the United States. But I'll save all that for later.
Tonight, we were eating dinner together in the hotel and they had put out a buffet spread just for us! And the food was fantastic! Plus we had an extra surprise that we didn't know was coming ...
That day happened to be our Tour Director Farid's birthday!! We were all so surprised when, after dinner, he brought out a cake with a lit birthday candle, to make the announcement. We congratulated him and of course all joined in a round of the "Happy Birthday" song!!
On a tour like this, where you're in a group most all day, every day, for several days, a good tour director means everything. And I've been so lucky on all three of my Gate 1 tours to have had fabulous leaders. And Jim and I both agreed that Farid was outstanding as well! We loved him, as did everyone else in our small but happy group! He was funny, friendly, patient, happy at all times, helpful, organized, and a total professional at his job. He had told us he'd led over 100 Gate 1 Tours, and he has lived all over the world. His life has revolved around travel, from the very beginning. The country he calls home right now is France.
Farid, if you by chance ever come across this blog, we just want to say "Thank you!!" again and let you know that you are a wonderfully positive, outgoing, unique individual and we are SO happy to have had the opportunity to meet you!!
The following morning ...
While I may have had my reservations about staying at a Radisson in Germany, the hotel could certainly cook! No doubt. This was the first, and only time, on the entire Germany trip that we found CRISPY bacon for breakfast! Yay!! Actually I wasn't even planning on going down to eat because the previous breakfasts had been so blah, but when Jim texted me this photo, I was throwing on my clothes and heading out the door to the elevator! haha!
That morning we had some extra time for a change and no one had to rush and get ready. We were boarding the bus at 10 am to head to the Bad Dürkheim wine region, about 30 minutes out of town.
I wasn't completely sure about a winery tour before noon, but it wasn't long before we all got with the program and were sipping various flavors of Mesel family wines as our tour guide (in gray above) talked about the business and wine region. He is one of the brothers who help run the place, along with their parents.
The Mesel Winery has been in business for 65 years, but both parents came from winemaking backgrounds with his father's family having been involved with grapes and wine for over 200 years! This was certainly a family tradition! Today they sell about 130,000 bottles of Mesel wine per year.
He carried a picnic basket of wine bottles and we followed him through the distillery rooms, the storage room, and out into the vineyards as he'd stop and open a different bottle of Mesel wine to share at each pause of the tour. While I might have preferred at least a partial "sit and sip" opportunity, it was a unique experience and he was a jovial guide. I'm not sure how many wine tours he does in a day, but he was drinking right along with us! haha! "Prost!"
When we were full of good cheer, and good wine, it was time to say goodbye and head into town for a group lunch. Arriving in the downtown area of Bad Dürkheim, we first did a brief walk around the area on our way to the Durkeimer Fass restaurant, across the large parking lot. You could see it from there ... the front of it was shaped like a giant wine barrel (photo below)!
Our "walk before lunch" took us by the Saline, a tall and long wooden structure first built in 1846. More than 200,000 bundles of brushwood are stacked into stable walls over which salt water from a medicinal spring trickles and evaporates. The salty droplets are good for the lungs and bronchial tubes. In addition, the evaporation pleasantly cools the ambient air in summer. The salt was mined using this method and sold in the city from the 14th to the 20th century. Today it still operates, but mainly as a tourist attraction. In the photo below, you can see a portion of it on the right side. The natural stream in the center of the picture ran all around the park property, like a freshwater lazy river, and children were playing in the shallow cool waters.
I thought this was a unique way to allow for the "locks of love" to be displayed, while keeping them off the main pedestrian bridge.
After some internet research, I've learned that these trees (probably London Plane trees) have been pollarded. Pollarding trees is a common practice in many European cities, less so in large American cities. To pollard a tree, one cuts back the new growth on a regular schedule to shape and train a tree, to maintain its size, or to harvest its wood. If done correctly, it doesn't harm the tree and new growth comes back every year.
I failed to photograph our lunch at the Durkeimer Fass restaurant. Since we were a pre-arranged group and the one payment was provided through Gate 1, we had each previously picked one of two lunch choices. We didn't get to order off of the regular menu. And for some reason, the lunch service took a tremendously long time. Too long. Farid had to go back to the kitchen to check on the progress more than once. But when it finally arrived, it was pretty good. Not the best, but not the worst meal of the trip either (spoiler alert ... that would come tomorrow). haha! But I chose the pulled pork sandwich and french fries, while Jim had the chicken and potatoes. Overall it wasn't bad at all. This is a photo of the crème brûlée dessert that Jim had. (Photo is actually of fellow traveler Pam's dessert. I'm just borrowing it here.) My dessert was three cinnamon mini donuts and ice cream.
Full from the winery visit. Full from lunch ... finally. So we boarded the bus to return to Mannheim. We got back around 3 pm and had the rest of the day at our leisure. So you know what Jim and I did ... yep, another afternoon nap! Yay!!
... a few hours later ...
Yawn. Ahhh. After that welcomed retreat, we got ourselves together and decided to walk to a nearby restaurant for dinner that night. Remember back several paragraphs ago when I said I wasn't yet sold on staying at the Radisson, or in Mannheim for that matter?
Our hotel was in a very quiet part of town. You had to go several streets over to reach a busy section with stores and restaurants. Our hotel was mostly surrounded by residential apartment buildings. It was so quiet out there.
Back in WWII, most of Mannheim had been destroyed. And when they rebuilt, it was done as fast as possible because people needed housing and businesses needed to reopen. There wasn't time for intricately designed buildings. These looked mostly the same, although the random balconies were nice. But it wasn't a "tourist section" of town. It was a residential section. So I thought the choice to stay there was odd.
But, as Jim and I took our evening walk to find a restaurant, I suddenly found a new appreciation for the place. It WAS quiet ... and that was a good thing. After a busy day of crowded streets and long restaurant wait times, it was actually really wonderful to wander around empty sidewalks and enjoy the quiet.
You looking at me?
Painted rocks are apparently a thing all over the world!
I loved how they intentionally parked on the street AND curb. Usually I do that as an accident back home.
We found a small corner Italian restaurant and ordered what I thought was a pepperoni and sausage pizza. The menu said pepperoni anyway. But what actually arrived was sausage and chopped pepperoncini peppers. I gave it a chance and it was good! It wasn't the loaded pizzas like we're use to getting back home, but it was tasty just the way it was.
After dinner we decided to keep on walking down to the Rhine River. Farid had taken some of us on that walk the night before, but Jim didn't go with us. So tonight it was just Jim and I.
There is a gravel riverside pathway for walking and then a green grassy space for lounging apparently. It was a Saturday night and there were so many families, groups of young adults, birthday parties, picnics, or just solo people with their dog, all enjoying spots in the grassy area. I just loved that. There wasn't a playground there, or pavilions, or anything like that. People were just out there on blankets or with folding chairs, hanging out and socializing with one another. Some had lawn games underway, and one group of college-aged kids were in what appeared to be a beer pong competition.
It was so refreshing and felt so alive! We certainly don't take time to do that back in Glennville, Georgia! It's hard to get our local people to come out on a night when there's a free band playing and food trucks. I certainly couldn't imagine our town folks just coming out to sit in the grass and watch the sun set.
Jim and I walked along, just enjoying the evening and watching the sun sink lower in the sky.
We talked to a couple from Holland who live in Mannheim now. They had their dog with them and Jim had wanted to take a photo of the dog because it somewhat resembled a skinnier version of our own dog, Sandy. It's a running joke with us now, but Jim said something along the line of, "What a sweet baby" as he approached them. And the guy came back with, "He's not a baby." The same exact thing had happened to me when I addressed a dog the day or so before. I'm like, "aww, hey sweet baby!" And the owner was quick to say, "Not a baby!" haha! I think they just didn't understand our southern terms of endearment, and were literally trying to educate us that their dogs were not puppies any longer, but grown adult dogs. It remained funny to us the rest of the trip!
We took a different route back to the hotel and it was a great walk. I just love how you can be in most any foreign country and still use GPS to find your way around, or find the nearest ice cream shop. Hint: that's exactly what we did! We each got an ice cream and headed on back to the hotel just as it was getting dark. Thanks, Mannheim, for giving us such a wonderful evening to take back home!!