Picture a castle perched on a mountain so steep that the forest on the mountain-sides has an odd vertical quality to it - almost like it's 2D - the trees seeming to grow above each other, rather than in ranks.
Picture the road that winds between these steep wooded slopes, picture if you can the views from the high places where the trees part and you feel you can see to the end of the world. There's a poetical side to me that would like to tell you that it was breath-taking but I'm an honest man at heart and I've never had my breath taken away simply by the sight of something.*
But I'm getting ahead of myself. To take you back to the start I must fast-forward a couple of hundred years to the modern Germany.
We'd inadvertently parked the car in such a place that, to reach it from the hotel today, we had to make an early-morning trip through the red light district. I'm not one to judge** but it's just not really the place I wanted to be. The clientele hanging about at that time of a morning aren't exactly the upscale business types you'd find elsewhere in and around a commercial city like Frankfurt, let's just put it that way, shall we? I'm not a fan of being leered at in general and when it's by the sort of people who were on that street this morning, it's even less pleasant. God knows how it must feel to work with those stares on you all the time.
Anyway, we got out of there pretty sharpish and hit the highway again. After a few wrong turnings we found Bundesstrasse 500, a fantastically scenic route through the peaks between Rheinland and Baden-Wurttemberg. Again we were going too quickly to get many photos. We did manage to stop and snap a few but they were low quality and did not do the scenery justice, so if you really want to see you'll have to make your own trip.
From there we found our way to Burg Hohenzollern; ancestral home of the Prussian Royal family, a title they apparently still claim even though their kingdom is no longer a kingdom. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's a striking building and well worth a visit if you can survive the hike and the altitude. Nerds, imagine a smaller Hogwarts crossed with an even more scaled-down Minas Tirith. Everyone else, imagine a really nice-looking fortified palace.
So, we stopped there for dinner and carried on to Stuttgart. Tomorrow we head for another castle, another scenic road, and Munich.
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*Well, maybe once. But that's another story for another blog entirely.
**Total lie; I'm a very judgemental person. I simply have no strong feelings one way or the other on ladies of negotiable affection.
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