August 17, 2015

We were sad to leave our friends in Kaiserslautern, but we made it to Heidelberg and had a great campsite!  We were right on the river and had a great view.  If it hadn’t been raining the entire time we were here, I think that we would have really enjoyed the city!  We got to town, got set up and made a quick run to the grocery store to refill our food supply.  Luckily, we had a break in the rain to walk over and pick up something for dinner.  After that, we hung out in the camp for the night and watched a movie in our tent (not much else to do in the rain!)

Despite the rain, we planned to visit the Heidelberg Castle right in the old town.  We took our ponchos and were ready for some cold/wet touring!

At the base of the mountain were the castle is built, there is a cable car to get up to the castle.  It probably would have been a nice walk if it had been a good day, but with the rain, the cable car was a much nicer way to travel!  It was a quick trip to the top!

The castle itself was really cool.  It was built close to 1,000 years ago and is still (sort of) standing today.  The majority of the castle has been destroyed;  partly by the French and partly by a fire, but what is left gives you a great idea of how awesome it was when it was standing.  We decided to take a tour, so that we could see the whole thing…you can only see the inside if you are on a tour.  The view was very nice (although would have been nicer if it was a sunny day!)

Inside of the castle was almost like a little town.  The courtyard is huge and there are lots of places where people would have lived back in the day.  The gardens were beautiful and had great views.  The actual castle was built over the coarse of a couple hundred years, so you can definitely see the different styles of building.  Part of the castle looks really old, medieval, and gothic, while other parts look for Renaissance.  The statues/sculptures reflect this too.

We weren’t really supposed to take pictures inside, but I managed to get a picture of the chapel without anyone noticing.  🙂  It was built underneath of the living area of the castle so that the royal family would have access to it easily.

After the tour, we went to the cellar to see the largest wine barrel in the world…holy cow…it was HUGE!  You can barely see Adam and Hayden standing on top of the wine barrel in the picture below.  They said that the average person drank 1 Liter of wine per day, so a 220,000 Liter wine barrel wasn’t really that crazy for a town that size.

After the tour, the rain had cleared up, so we took a nice walk back to the campsite.  We knew it would be a few km, but didn’t realize that is was over 5 km away…oops.  At least we got some good exercise for the day!  On the bright side, the view from the other side of the river was beautiful!

We are leaving here tomorrow and heading further south to Rothenberg ob der Tauber, which we are pretty excited about.  It is a medieval city and looks like it did several hundred years ago.  Hayden and Adam are excited to walk on the walls and climb up the towers!