The Fairy Tale Road… Backwards (Bremen to Hanau) DAY 3

The route for the FTR has towns marked every 10-30 km from each other, so making it to our next stop, Bad Oeynhausen, wasn’t stressful or complicated. Finding the tourist office however was. We strolled through the town; we saw a fountain with pigs, and another one with a lady lying down before we found the entrance to the park that contained many gorgeous buildings built by the Romans and the massive tourist office. This park was quite nice with many huge fountains, a large pond and many walking paths. There was a lot going on too. It seemed like there was some kind of wine fest going on and a couple getting their wedding pictures taken. The tourist office was in a huge building and we missed it because we didn’t tilt our heads up high enough to see the huge red flag bearing the information logo. The young lady that was helping us didn’t speak any English and knew nothing of the FTR. She did her best, even calling a co-worker that spoke some English; it took us well over an hour to finally learn that there was a fairy tale museum. We made our way to the museum and I’m sure if we lived here we would love the 2 hour lunch breaks, but since we are traveling here, it was not nice to learn the museum was closed for lunch. It was a pretty small building (might have been a house originally), we didn’t think they had English translations so we left the town thinking if the rest of the towns turn out to be this useless is it worth the drive to the others? Our new goal is now trying to find free internet to translate our map and visit the town’s tourist office website to see what they offer before we visit them. The next town we went to was again on the map, but they didn’t know it (Rinteln). We saw some pretty cool buildings, fountains and strange statues, one statue of a night watch man and one of a glass blower. This town did have a stellplatz, but we just used it to park for our trip into town. Our last stop had to be better, but turned out to be a dud too. We were unable to find the tourist office in Hessich Oldendorf so we spent most of our time walking up and down the market only to stumble on a VW touring club. We saw many nice VW’s and took some photos too. It was here that we also stumbled on a wine festival, they had a pretty large stage and a dance floor set up, but it was clear the party hadn’t started yet. After we had our fill of the town we went back to our van and proceeded to look for the Stellplatz. It was here, in this small town that had nothing to do with the FTR that we finally had free internet access. The Fairy Tale Road has its own website, and we were able to learn all about the road and the towns mentioned. The list went from 59 (60 including Bremen) stops to 11 and we opted to only do 10, as one stop was on the other side of the river and only mentioned that you might run into Puss and Boots.