Friday, October 12th - Wuerzburg.
Bob: The day dawned cloudy, foggy, and cold, so we decided to drive North and see Wuerzburg as it was recommended by the guidebooks and was only about 50 kilometers away. Driving the rural roads as much as possible gave us a chance to see the countryside better, but it was also quite slow as many more towns are on those roads than are shown on the maps, and traffic slows down to 50 kilometers an hour to crawl through each and every one of them. Now 50 kph is about 30 miles per hour and it seemed really slow to me, but going faster is dangerous because of the automated speed cameras. I ended the trip with two such speeding tickets. But on this day I was in no particular hurry and I even found a parking space relatively easily when we finally arrived in downtown Wuerzburg. The parking was, as is typical in Germany, pay parking where the limit is two hours. So after paying and putting the time-stamped receipt in the windshield, we hustled off into the central old town district. One of the greatest of the treasures damaged by the WWII bombing was the Residenz, the palace of the ruling bishop-princes of the Wuerzburg area from around 1200 to Napoleon's time. The bishop-princes had both the tithes from the churches and the usual governmental taxes to fill their treasury, and they used it to create an enormous palace with a large expanse of formal gardens and lavishly decorated rooms. We came upon the gardens first as we walked over to the Residenz, so we took some time to wander around them, enjoy the flowers that were still blooming (roses, pansies, marigolds, etc.) and take pictures of it all. I was amused by some carefully-shaped evergreen trees that were so conical that they looked quite artificial, and not only that but each one also had a statue of some mythological creature or person hidden at the base of the tree. I saw Pan with his pipes, a satyr (I think) and what I took to be other gods and goddesses. |
Monika: Today was the day for the Romantic Street, a designated route that starts in Wuerzburg and tries to stop at every palace, cathedral, or old city between Wuerzburg and Neuschwanstein, the quintessential German Castle. Wuerzburg's palace, the residence of the Bishop-Prince of this region, was not quite as outlandish but quite beautiful. We drove to Wuerzburg the quick way, Autobahn and then a Bundesstrasse that led us directly downtown, where we grabbed the first available parking spot. Unfortunately, it was only a two hour spot, but we parked, paid, and headed over to the residence. We first walked through the formal gardens and then tried to get into the residence. It was temporarily closed because because of overcrowding. But we were assured, we would be able to get in in a couple of minutes. Of course, I was chomping at the bit because of the parking meter, but was not ready to give up. |
Bob: After waiting for 20 minutes or so out in the cold, they finally let us into the Residenz and we were lucky enough to get an English language tour. Our tour guide was quite good and explained a lot about the set of restored rooms on the South wing of the palace. If you visit the Residenz, make sure to take the tour because that is the ONLY way you will see that set of rooms, and they are surely worth looking at. The decorations were fantastically elaborate, in a elaborate Baroque or Rococo style with a tremendous amount of gilt, filigree, and other forms of ornamentation. It was very "busy" to modern eyes, but also very interesting. The most intriguing room was the room of mirrors. The walls of the room were covered with about 200 mirrors, but most of them were in turn painted on or partially covered with various figures like angels, cupids, and assorted saints and ordinary people as well as animals like peacocks and other exotic fauna. Our guide mentioned that the mirror room was used for state receptions, and the reflections in flickering candlelight must have just been fantastic! After the tour ended we had about 20 minutes left to see the North wing of the palace before we had to hotfoot it back to the car to buy some more parking time. Aesthetically speaking, I thought the set of rooms on the East side of the North wing (facing the gardens out in back), were particularly nice. Although also Baroque, they were decorated using the more standard Baroque color scheme of cream with gilt highlights. Each room had a different central feature or design motif, but the cream and gilt walls gave that set of rooms a form of aesthetic unity. They did not, however, blow us away the way the rooms in the South wing had done. The set of rooms on the West side of the North wing were, to my mind, even less impressive. They were basically decorated in the Empire style of Napoleon. Very nice, really, but the main difference between the rooms seemed to be the base color of the walls, which shifted from pastel green to pastel pink to an off white to some other very pleasant, but also very forgettable, pastel colors. In fact, the wall colors were reminiscent of how we had just repainted the ground floor of our house, so you can tell how insipid THAT was! |
Monika: 15 minutes later we did get in paid our dues and started up the stairs where we were lucky enough to join an English tour that had the additional advantage of being quite small. The first thing you see is an enormous painted, vaulted ceiling above the staircase. We found out that at the time it was built, other architects did not think that the vaulted ceiling would last. However, it even withstood the bombings, when a bomb destroyed the roof and stuff fell on the ceiling, but the ceiling held up to it and the beautiful paintings can still be enjoyed. The rooms themselves were ornate and walls covered with tapestry. Our guide was extremely knowledgeable and lively. When she described on room with tapestries about Italian entertainment, she explained about the stock characters and acted some of it out. The most beautiful room was the mirror cabinet and I would love to see it in the evening and candlelit. It had been destroyed but they had a painting of what it looked like plus a fragment of the original mirrors and seemed to have done a great job restoring it. After the tour through one section, we could wander through the other sections on our own. It is always interesting to see a palace that belongs to a cleric. These servants of the church seemed to have a love of opulence like any other ruler. |
Bob: Leaving the Residenz we did get back to the car in time to avoid a ticket, paid for two more hours, and walked back to the main market area. There we bought some rolls to snack on and wandered through the market square. I saw one store built right into the base of the cathedral, and that did surprise me. The way the modern single story building (think miniature Wal Mart) jutted out from the buttresses of the Gothic styled cathedral (think Cantebury Cathedral) just hit me in the eye, so to speak. Not sure what that was all about, but personally I wish they would tear down the store and let the church stand on its own. Although the cathedral or Dom was an old building, it turned out to have a nice, modern looking interior. The stained glass windows in the nave were definitely modern, but that may have been due to the destruction of the bombing at the end of World War II. Although Wuerzburg was a university town and had no appreciable industry, the population was just over 100,000 at that time and that made it big enough to be a target for Allied bombing. Those bombing raids resulted in the senseless destruction of many of the ancient treasures of the city's past and I suppose many thousands of innocent lives lost, which I'm sure is part of the reason that the German people nowadays seem to truly abhor war. |
Monika: We would have loved to linger but the parking meter called. We got back only 15 minutes late, put in another 2 Euros and now where ready to see the town. Our book on the romantic road had a very nice map of Wuerzburg that allowed us to see the sights efficiently. We stopped at the cathedral with its beautiful altar. Then walked to the market square picking up a sandwich on the way. |
Bob: From the market we walked across an old bridge across the River Main, which gave us nice views up and down the river. We also saw the Marienhof, the castle of the bishop-princes which they used to suppress the local population as they were consolidating their power. Curiously, a vineyard ran right up the hill to the base of the old fort, and that pattern we saw in many other places on our drive along the Main: vineyards were located on many of the sloping hills. |
Monika: From there we walked down to the Main River and across the pedestrian bridge. It reminded me of the Charles Bridge in Prague. The bridge also had statues in every nook and cranny. I guess these were all the Bishops that reigned over the city. One thing, with Bishop Princes you don't get a dynasty going. You just have to have good relations with the Pope. Across the river we could see the Marienburg, the gleaming white castle on top of a hill. This was the seat of the bishop before the residence in town was built. After crossing the bridge we walked along the Main and then crossed back to the main downtown area and headed for our car. |
Bob: The drive back to Rothenburg was pleasant in that we saw a lot of nice bucolic countryside with farms, pastures and vineyards. The drive was frustrating, however, in that we kept getting lost due to the poor signage on the German roads. That system does not use numbers but rather the towns in the direction of each road, and often those towns had nothing to do with our real destination, so things became quite confusing. As long as we had both a very detailed map that had all the little towns plus the GPS which gave our exact location and direction, we were fine. We had a detailed bicycling map of the Wuerzburg area that I had bought on a previous trip to Germany (Wanderung 5), but I had those maps only for certain areas. When we drove out of the area covered by our small-scale bicycling map, we had to rely on our larger-scale Michelin map, and that was when we got turned around a couple of times and well and truly lost once. I finally had to pull over and explore the maps on the GPS, panning the cursor around to nearby areas and then zooming in to see if I could find the town we wanted to drive to next. That was a slow and painstaking process, but it did work and we were finally on our way again. We arrived back in Rothenburg safely, parked the car, and bought some stuff for dinner. But after dinner Monika took off for a shopping spree while I worked on the acrostics for a while to calm down from the driving. To round out the evening we worked on our journals and finally turned in for the night. |
Monika: We had decided to drive back along the Romantic Street. Since the street stops at many different little towns it is not just one Bundesstrasse, in fact, sometimes it is a secondary road. Navigating this drove me almost to insanity. As long as I had detailed maps, I got us out of Wuerzburg and to the next stop. After that things got a tad more dicey. The German penchant for just telling you hamlets that you may or may not want to go to means that you have to look along the road to find something that fits in with the street you need. For a while things went ok, but then, we actually stopped at a turn off, checked with the GPS which way we were going and finally figured out that we were going south instead of north. Well after turning around and finally finding the right little road we made it to the next stop. I was frazzled enough, that I did not want to stop just to look at another church or palace. We finally made it back to Rothenburg and went up to our room. Since it was already 1/4 to six, I decided I better get into town to buy another doll that was going to come in today. Bob decided, doing an Acrostic puzzle sounded like a lot more fun than shopping, so I went alone. I got to the store in time, and then walked a little more through this charming little town, stopping for some postcards and other necessities. |
| Prolog | Germany Map | Cruise Map | Epilog |
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