Starting the last third of the trip, I find myself in Regensburg, a city Taylor & I visited maybe a dozen years ago. Regensburg epitomizes the type of town I like to visit in Europe. It has a long history and it doesn't hawk it from innumerable souvenir shops. It's a modern living city with pieces of the past embedded at every turn. The Roman Pretorian Gate is a fragment in the corner of a building. Walk around the town and you become aware of numerous towers, apparently built by wealthy burghers in the 12th -14thC, these towers being used today in a variety of ways in everyday Regensburg life. Some are restored, painted, others aren't. Walk around a corner and a hairdressing salon will have a doorway from when it was a chapel in the 12th C. There is an old stone pedestrian bridge across the Danube, with a wurst haus at its foot that claims to have originated with the building of the bridge in the mid 1100s, and is considered to be the oldest wurst haus in Germany. As you walk around Regensburg, you feel history unfolding from the past through the present into the future. Not history as Las vegas tourist tackiness nor museum-like stasis, but history as dynamic becoming.

After Regensburg, I revisit Nurnberg. The stellplatz is free and a nice 2 km walk along a river park to the centrum. Nurnberg has a very livable fusgangerweg (pedestrian-only) zentrum; unfortunately this city, a pre-1945 landmark of German architecture from the middle ages on, was almost completely destroyed in WWII. However, it still makes for a fine visit, with a good feel to it, some remnants of older buildings, some very interesting fountains and, strangely enough, an almost intact city wall surrounding it.

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INTERLUDE: Bier und Schnapps

I've long been an afficionado of German ( & Belgian) beers. Two of my top ten are Schlenkerla rauchbier (smoked beer) in Bamberg & Schneider wheat (weizen: hefeweizen (unfiltered) & the dark doppelweizen branded Aventinus) beers in Munchen/Kelheim. Schnapps I had always regarded as kind of a crude but somehow authentically earthy liquor. The first time I had it was when I was 18 & hitch-hiking through Europe. The son of a family near St. Gallen Switzerland had offered me a place to "crash" for the night. The family owned a small country inn and offered me coffee with schnapps in it. Since I did not drink any alcohol at the time, I asked how strong it was & he said it was "just made from fruits, etc.", implying a mild alcohol content ( I'm sure due to language difficulties). Anyway I knocked back a fair amount of coffee & schnapps that night and probably slept very well! Subsequently I tried the generic schnapps available in Canada, but found it wanting. 

Well this time I found a rauchbier schnapps at Schlenkerla and an Aventinus schnapps at Schneider (with their accompanying glasses, of course :-). This tiny portal into der welt von schnapps has opened my eyes. Each one is different, a subtle distillation of the bier from whence it came. I've come to appreciate schnapps as a very refined liquor, distilling the spirit of its source in a manner far from crude.

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Next I revisit Rothenburg ob der Tauber - a town that had the good fortune to be booming in the 13th C, then basically finding itself a backwater by the 17th & 18th C. Laws passed in the 19th C ensured it retained its medieval architectural elements & thus we have today one of the most stunning examples anywhere of a medieval European town.

Departing Rothenburg I take a leisurely small highway up the northernmost section of the "Romantische Strasse" - filled with gentle green slopes, vineyards, watchtowers, waterwheels and towns with fragments of the past bursting forth at every turn.

I take a brief stop in Weikersheim, where Taylor & I stayed in a gasthof on our first trip to Europe together (1987). It has a schloss (castle) where operas and other musical events are offered, and which also has a series of gardens, one of which is the odd "alchemist's garden".

Leaving Weikersheim I continue thru the gently rolling German countryside towards the Odenwald and come to rest in Miltenberg, a town on the Main River with basically one long street of half-timbered medieval houses & a castle and other grand homes built into the hill above. Here I visit the biergarten of the local brauerie ( Faust ) and try a selection of 5 of their biers, all vom fass ( & only 10 cl per bier! :-).

Now I enter the return phase of the trip - most of the places I'll visit from here back to Amsterdam are revisits of familiar towns.

I travel thru the Odenwald to Michelstadt, south of which I climb up and explore 2 of no less than 4 castles parked almost right next to each other, then along the Valley of the Neckar (Neckartal) thru Heidelberg, up to Worms.