There have always been two German towns at the top of my list for weekend getaways as soon as we got to Germany: Heidelberg and Rothenburg ob der Tauber.
Our favorite tourist activity is to visit picturesque places, wander around and soak it in, and take photos. We will do tours and visit museums here and there, but give us a crumbly castle, pretty and/or historic things, or some sort of natural wonder, and we don’t need much besides time to read about it on any convenient signs (or our phones) and set up for photos. Both Heidelberg and Rothenburg are perfect for this exact sort of tourism, and luckily for us, they are easy trips from Wiesbaden.
Heidelberg
We visited Heidelberg last Sunday for a quick day trip. It’s only about an hour from Wiesbaden, so we just went down for a couple of hours so Chris could see the amazing castle (I visited Heidelberg in 2004, so I knew how great it was). For this trip we just wandered around the castle grounds (okay — hiked up the extremely steep hill with frequent pauses to “take in the view” aka catch my breath.) Next time we visit we will plan it out a little better so we can take a full tour, visit the famous bridge, and maybe do a river cruise since they seemed really popular. I also assume Heidelberg will become a fairly frequent stop when we’re hosting family and friends who are into big crumbly castles with a ton of interesting history.
Rothenburg
Rothenburg is actually only about 2 hours from Wiesbaden, but we decided to get a hotel for a couple of nights and bring the dogs with us over Memorial Day weekend.
The dogs are slowly improving on our daily walks, but since they are still really reactive to other dogs and don’t do super well in over stimulating environments, we made sure to take them on an extra long walk the morning of the trip. We also put their bandanas on, which we sprayed with a calming spray and we gave them small doses of trazadone, which our vet prescribed before we left Maryland. With all of those precautions the dogs were okay — they weren’t good by any stretch of the imagination and we had to be constantly watching for other dogs, but it could have gone worse.
One of the first things we did once we got settled in the hotel was to take the dogs for a walk. Luckily, there was a large park-like green space just down the road from our hotel, so after letting the dogs do their business, we settled down on a bench to let the dogs soak it in. They were pretty reactive to most things — bicycles, people with umbrellas, little kids running, and strollers, but other dogs were particularly triggering for them, and of course the random parade of furries that passed by set Ghost off. (Volume up to hear Ghost lose it near the end.)
Once we were worn out from wrestling the dogs we left them in the hotel room to recover, while we went out to explore the town some. For those who don’t know, Rothenburg is a very well preserved medieval town that has a wall dating from the 13th century surrounding it. It is amazingly picturesque with timbered houses, several huge churches, clock towers, cobblestone roads, and on any given summer weekend — about a kajillion tourists. We mostly stuck close to the area around our hotel, which was right near the town square, and took a bunch of pictures of all the great, old buildings. We had been told by multiple people and websites to check out the Night Watchmen’s tour, but there was an extremely large crowd for the tour, so we decided to opt out and catch it another time.
Sunday morning we woke up early and took the dogs for another long walk. There weren’t a ton of people or dogs out and about, so we were able to explore quite a bit with the girlies, with minimal Ghost screaming. We even got the dogs up on the wall with us as we walked around some, although we had to carry them back down the stairs from the wall since the steps were incredibly steep and French bulldogs aren’t known for their athletic maneuvers.
After breakfast we checked out the Criminal Museum, where we learned about all the horrific ways humans tortured each other — there was a lot of emphasis on leg screws, thumb/finger screws, and various stockades. We did learn however, that the concept of the Iron Maiden as a form of punishment was almost certainly made up by showmen in the 1800s as a way to attract visitors to their displays (seriously — some things never change).
After the museum we wandered to a cafe on the town square for some more coffee, a schneeball (a round of fried dough that is famous in the region, but pretty underwhelming to eat), and some people watching. One of the clock towers in the square has a famous display where every hour there is a reenactment of an incident from 1630 where the mayor drank almost a gallon of wine in one draught to save the town. While we were enjoying our coffee and schneeball, we watched dozens of tourists gather in front of us aiming their phones at the clock tower, to squint and record a very underwhelming 30-45 second animatronic display really high up on the tower. Sadly, we didn’t think to take any photos of the display on the tower or the display of the tourists.
Once we had wandered the town a bit to see more amazing old buildings and checked out a few tourist shops, we went back to the hotel for round two of the dogs vs new places. This time we packed a bag with a couple of beers, some dog water, a dog bed, and a ton of dog treats. We went back to the same park bench we used Saturday, and set ourselves up to just hang out on a beautiful day. This time though, the girlies behaved much better, partly because we were doing a really good job of identifying dogs that entered the park and picking up the girls and making sure they couldn’t see any of them, and we were being really proactive shoving treats in their face to distract them whenever something exciting caught their eye. In between exciting distractions Minnie hung out on her dog bed just taking it all in, while Ghost hung out on my lap. They weren’t perfect by any means, but they were pretty good all things considered.
Monday morning we took the girls out fairly early, and quickly learned the price of shoving so many treats at the girls on Sunday. Ghost barely cleared the outdoor rug in front of the hotel before she pooped for the first time on the sidewalk, and even Minnie didn’t make it far up the street before she also had to go. (They generally prefer to wait for grass or at least dirt.) Luckily it was raining just a bit, so we were able to pick up the worst of it and the rain washed the rest away pretty quickly. The girls had obviously also forgotten all of their lessons from Sunday and were behaving terribly for our walk, which was stressful. Since we had more or less done what we wanted to do in town, and we had to take care of some errands at home, we left around 10 to head back to our apartment.
Despite the shenanigans, we rated the trip a success. We learned some important lessons about taking the girls with us on vacations, and their behavior Sunday gave us hope that we could eventually get them to the point where they aren’t a complete embarrassment in public.
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