Romantic Road - Day 1

After a frantic rush to get ourselves ready to leave the campsite (fill up on water, dump toilet and garbage, shower etc), we were off by 12:30. About 5 minutes into the drive I stopped the van and Julie and I had a brief argument. She was telling me to turn onto paths, not roads and I didn’t trust her directions. We had a laugh afterwards because we both forgot to switch the GPS back to “Truck” from “Pedestrian” mode. This is not the first time we’ve done this. So, following the correct route to our next town, Tauberbischofsheim we were off. We discovered earlier that these suggested driving routes don’t always suggest the most exciting towns (e.g. The Fairy Tale Road), so we marked out the few we wanted to actually stop at and the ones we could camp at for free. As for the rest of the towns, they were just waypoints for the GPS to get down the road properly. Tauberbischofsheim was the first “drive-thru” town. We didn’t however input all of the towns until after this one, because we didn’t think we needed too. We then drove 10 km to the town of Lauda-Konigshofen and then another 10 km to Bad Mergentheim. For whatever reason, Bad Mergentheim reminded me of the movie Willow and the character Mad Martigan – this was once again completely wasted on Julie as she doesn’t remember the movie all that well. We continued driving through the towns of Weikersheim, Rottingen, Creglingen and finally had our first stop at Rothenburg O.D.T, roughly 98 km from Wurzburg. Rothenburg ob der Tauber (which means Rothenburg above the Tauber River) is a famous stop for a few reasons. The first of which, the Castle Road and the Romantic Road cross paths here, and it has many festivals with performances throughout the summer. However, it being October 15th, there are no such festivals. We would have stayed longer in this town, but it was 2 euros for parking per hour, so we stayed for 1 hour. The main shopping strip was littered with tourist aimed shops, Christmas shops and stuffed animal shops etc. Christmas seems to be very important in Germany as we have noticed Christmas shops in every single town and in some cases have seen decorations up. After our hurried, and to some point disappointing, exploration of Rothenburg O.D.T we made our way through Schillingsfurst on our way to our free camp spot in Wornitz. Wornitz is not a town on the Romantic Road, but is along the route. The stop was once again at a Truck stop rest station.