The Fairy Tale Road… Backwards (Bremen to Hanau) DAY 4

Day 4 on the FTR found us in Hameln, where 130 children disappeared from the town in 1284 and the Brothers Grim created the Pied Piper story on this event. Every day during the summer the towns people put on a play of the Pied Piper story in the town square. Many people showed up to view this play, as well as us and we were surprised to hear the story in so many languages before the play began.



Once it was over we made our way back to the van and were pulled over by cops once we left the parking spot. We passed these cops walking back to our van, as they had set up a road block on the street. Apparently there was a large week long rock/punk concert and they were pulling everyone over that looked questionable. Julie says she saw one cop taking of a glove that was “dirty”. Anyhow, it was mostly the van we figure they suspected, but we were summoned to pull over. When they asked us where we were heading off to, I am pretty sure they had a laugh afterwards as I handed him the FTR map and pointed to the next town…. they let us pass without incident. It was off to Polle to visit Cinderella’s castle. We arrived in the town and found parking. The town was very small, I would say around 1000 people and the tourist office wasn’t open for a bit. However, it was extremely easy to see the castle ruins from pretty much anywhere in the town so we made our way up the path to visit the castle. The castle itself was pretty pathetic and we were pretty disappointed to see “Cinderella’s” castle, it did however provide great views of the surrounding area.




Ten minutes later (yeah, that’s how big the castle was) we were off to see if the tourist office was open yet as Julie wanted to pick up some info on Polle for her records. We had to wait 15 minutes still so we called home to speak with our parents. Trendelburg was our last sightseeing stop for the day and was in a very high village that contains Repunzels tower. We parked in front of a church and had no idea where or if the town had a tourist office. Before we could make our way to the tower, Julie noticed a very oddly built home. The entire front was not flat but concave. Really bizarre. Speaking of bizarre, the town was so quite, so dead. It really felt like we came across a ghost town. It was just plain creepy. The tower was pretty high, and the castle that was left is now a restaurant. The views were spectacular, but it was a shame we couldn’t climb up the tower itself, we did show up after 5, so the place was probably closed for the day. The weather today was great, it hadn’t rained all day but it did later that night, the first day for sunshine since we arrived at Bremen 5 days ago. Our last town for the day was really only for the free Stellplatz in Hofgeismar.