Rothenburg Ob der Tauber, Germany

From Bamburg, we set out to our next destination: Rothenburg Ob der Tauber.

Rothenburg is a delightful little walled village that still largely resembles an old-style German village. According to a guide we had (the entertaining "Night Watchman"), the village fell on hard-times during the Thirty Years War when it was sacked and left in poverty for the next century or so. In the early 20th Century, it was "rediscovered" and became a tourist spot until World War II when it received its share of shelling that destroyed parts of the outer ends of the town.

Not ones to let their tourist destination mojo go awry, the folks of Rothenburg managed to get donors from all over the world to help pay to rebuild their walls and buildings after the war. The town is now... just cute as hell.

I have to admit I found Rothenburg to be the most attractive destination we visited, and that includes our visit to Schloss Neuschwanstein. It's got cobblestones pretty much everywhere (which loses its charm when you're lugging bags from the train station, but I digress again). It's got tourist shops, restaurants, and little pubs galore. One end of the village has a fair-sized park set up against a cliff. As we were there in autumn, the park was covered in leaves of red-and-gold, giving it the appearance of something out of a C.S. Lewis novel.

It was a town that prided itself on pastries. We saw pastries of all sorts all over the place, including pretzels (though not the super-sized pretzels I'd heard Germany was famous for... we found those later in Munich).

And these folks love their Xmas stuff. There's a few shops dedicated purely to Xmas decorations. My traveling companions lost themselves in those shops for hours while I set off to explore the other touristy-stuff the town had to offer (Xmas decorations give me seizures).

In all honesty, I can't describe Rothenburg accurately. It's just too neat. No words I have can do it justice. We lucked out in that we had clear (albeit cold) weather. It's a fun place and I'd cheerfully return if the chance manifests in the future.