This past weekend Alex and I decided to take a road trip to a small medieval town in Germany. We rented a car and drove the 3.5 hours to Rothenburg ob der Tauber. We stayed in a cute little hotel right outside the city center. We got in late Friday night so we decided to wake up early Saturday morning to explore as much of the town as we could. We checked out the city center, walked on the huge stone walls built around the entire town, and took the iconic Rothenburg o.d Tauber picture (see above). And of course, we had to do a few real touristy things. We picked out a shot glass at a souvenir shop, bought two bottles of local wine and ate at an 1100 year old restaurant.

The restaurant “Zur Höll” (meaning literally to hell – yikes!) is the oldest building in Rothenburg. I sampled the local wine and ordered the sausage platter for dinner while Alex tried the daily special, duck. It turned out to be a pretty cool restaurant and the food was delicious! After sampling the wine I had to use the bathroom. If you’ve ever traveled with me, you would know how terrible I am at figuring out European bathrooms and today was no exception. In my defense, this bathroom was…interesting. It started out fine, the first door was clearly labeled with “toiletten” so I walked through it and came upon another option. To the left was the kitchen, to the right was a staircase and straight ahead was a door with a swan on it.  I choose the swan. That door brought me outside into the rain! But it turned out to be the correct choice and the bathroom was actually another 20 steps further outside, in this creepy alley, in two separate men/women buildings. It was the weirdest thing, I don’t think I’ll ever understand European bathrooms – at least I didn’t have to pay at this one!

After dinner we went to the city center to participate in the “Night Watchman” tour. The watchman, dressed in traditional watchman garb (a cloak, axe, horn and lantern) walked us around for about an hour in the rain (did I mention it rains EVERY DAY here?) describing the different historical sites in town. It was a very interesting tour and I would definitely recommend it. All in all it was a fun filled weekend with lots of good food and wine (and weird bathrooms 😉).