Germany Day 11: Braunfels and Gießen
We left Burghotel auf Schönburg and drove to Schloß Braunfels. After touring the castle we drove on to the town of Gießen for lunch before continuing on to our planned stop for the night in Erfurt.
Schloß Braunfels is a private residence that sits high above the small town of Braunfels. We found the tour of the castle very informative even though it was in German. Part way through the tour they give the visitors a chance to take pictures of the panoramic view of the town and countryside from the outside grounds (no pictures are allowed inside the castle). The castle has been renovated quite a few times, but it still retains an old world charm.
Moving on, we drove to the small town of Gießen for lunch. We had a hard time finding the old town center with the old architecture, because there are not many old buildings left in Gießen. Gießen was heavily bombed by the Allies in 1944 during WWII, which destroyed 75% of the town, according to Wikipedia. We meandered around the farmer's market which was in full swing at the time and found a stand selling Thüringer Rotwurst, which is a blood sausage well-known in the region. After enjoying our lunch of sausages, we strolled around the town a little more and stumbled across a botanical garden. After a short, peaceful walk through the botanical garden with its interesting and beautiful plants and flowers, we headed back to our car. We enjoyed our small glimpse into the town of Gießen, with its farmer's market and botanical garden, despite the lack of old architecture, but it is still sad that so much history and so many lives were destroyed by war.
Our destination for the end of the day was Erfurt. We were anxious to get there for dinner because our daughter was joining us. She had finished up her finals and took a train from Berlin to Erfurt to join us for the final days of our trip. Of course, we were stuck in traffic jams (Stau's) on the autobahn which made us a little late, but that just gave our daughter some time to have a lovely conversation with Kerstin Herber, the owner of Hotel Domizil, our hotel for the night. Hotel Domizil is a small, family-run hotel, the kind we like to stay in. Family-run hotels usually make us feel like we make a personal connection to the locals. Hotel Domizil is a modern renovation of an old building, very nicely done. The hotel is top notch and is a place we would definitely recommend to anyone. We wished we could have stayed another night or two. It had a parking spot for our car in their garage and we were excited that the garage had a car "elevator" where they can stack more than one car on top of each other. We had seen one of these before, thirty years ago at a small hotel in Munich, that we had described to our daughter in the past, but it was nice that she got the chance to see one in action.
We spent a lovely evening catching up with our daughter while enjoying our dinner at an outdoor table in a town square with live music playing. The storefront lined bridge was fascinating. You don't realize you're on a bridge until you walk around the backside of the buildings. Our daughter shares our love of our wandering technique of touring, so we wandered around the town the rest of the evening before heading back to our hotel room, with its beautiful view of the Erfurter Dom (cathedral) glowing in its night lights.
(RB)