Day 33: Around Bad Rodach

Today we biked down to the town (village) and spent some time looking around. This is the city hall.

But first, as always, the lovely included hotel breakfast. It's not first in the blog today because the first photo is the one that shows when it's shared so this is an effort to have a photo other than breakfast show. Heh.

The handsome husband has breakfast. Exciting, eh?

So, we biked down to the town and stopped again to look at the giant birds atop the... whatever it is... that we saw on Friday. We now think they are storks, based on just about nothing except we've seen the word Stork used in a local business. We do not know birds...

Like last time, there are at least three of them moving around up there in the giant nest. This... pedestal thing is just in a car park beside the road.

We noticed some signs advertising summer fun. Apparently starting Thursday there's a big bird shoot coming up? The second banner is advertising the summer rate for a day pass to the Thermalbad. The third one is a concert or play, perhaps?

Our first destination was the train station to see if we can sort some train tickets for the weekend. Alas, the answer was no. This train station has no humans working and is all boarded up with a sign reminding folks to call the 800 number or buy tickets online. There is a ticket dispensing machine but we aren't ready to try that yet. And, we aren't desperate for train tickets yet. They are easier to figure out online, but then how do we print the ticket? Hmm...  Notice that the tracks end here. This is the end of the line and it seems the train coming to here from Coburg is generally only two cars (both engines with passenger space?).

So, then we biked over to the tourist information center to see if Frau Shiela (not how to spell her name, no doubt, but we know it isn't Schiller...) is working today.  The Tourist Info center is the bottom floor front section on the right. 

This is the hunting palace that belonged to a long line of Herzogin royalty.  The last owner was the brother of the husband (Prince Albert?) of Queen Victoria (of Great Britain). The family would come here to hunt and relax, apparently. However, in the 1880s, they insisted that the town sell them the forest and the town said, no because the forest was needed for survival and the economy. So, the family sold the palace to the town instead. The town used it as a school for about a century, and since then it has been used as the tourist info center, an exhibition space, and some other things we don't quite understand. It has some interesting historical information inside but no original furniture or furnishings. A hundred years as a school sort of makes that impossible, no doubt.  

The fountain in front is a naked female archer.  It is not a rounded building but the pano feature of the phone camera makes it look that way. It's the only way to get the whole thing in one photo from the front because its little square is surrounded by buildings.

Here's a side view without the distortion. You can see what a beautiful day it is!

We wandered around the square (which isn't square but that's the best word we have) and found a monument to a former school superintendent, Christian Hohnbaum.

Then we walked through the city walls to the outside (on the north) and found they were beautiful decorated with roses and other plants.

Apparently, this is a memorial to the German poet Friedrick Rückert who came here as a guest of the beloved school superintendent, Christian Hohnbaum.

The city walls on the north are well preserved and dotted with a variety of towers.

A number of plaques on the wall apparently exhibit snippets of Rückert's poetry.

I will translate these later. 

More poetry!

Most of the towers have the typical keyhole shaped openings, presumably for archers.

More wall and more archer slots.

We walked around the walls to get a glimpse again of the church and the path.

This tower is short and squatty!

And, in front of it, is a modern playground.

Here's the handsome grandson of a former inhabitant of Bad Rodach.

More wall and tower shots!

More flowers planted around the wall and paths.

After this we went back to the tourist info center for a restroom break. While waiting for me, Andy met a nice young lady named Frau Doktor Anya Augustin, who is the local medieval expert.  She conducts historical tours and invited us to the Tuesday night tour, which we will surely do.  She also had opinions about how Andy can find more info about his grandfather, the local ghosts, places to bike, local bike shop/repair guy, and restaurants. She is a gold mine of information.

We biked off to find some lunch, first trying the local Italian restaurants but both are closed on Mondays. So, we went to the Stadt Cafe (city cafe) and had some lovely food, including onion soup, ham noodles, and so forth.

This place has fantastic desserts and Andy went for the peach torte!

After this, we wandered to the local store of all things (postcards, stationary, office supplies, books, toys, you name it, and also the tiny post office (inside this tiny store) to buy postcards and stamps.

Then, off to the shoe store to look at sandals. Amelia likes Birkenstocks and all hers are worn out so some shoe shopping was in order, especially as they cost half here of what they cost in the USA.

We bought two pairs of sandals and had a long chat with the store owner. This sort of thing inevitably happens because we are always asked, how long are you here and why. Apparently, Bad Rodach does not get a teaming crowd of foreign tourists. 

The lady who owns the shoe store is the third generation here, her grandfather started the store. He was born in 1900, three years before Andy's grandfather. She is pretty sure they must have known each other, since Andy's grandfather was a leather worker. She is going to ask around to see if she can find some info on Richard Baldes (grandpa) or his family.

Then, at the shoe store owner's suggestion, we went off to find the church office, which is not located at the church, so we could see what the hours are in order to come back on another day to talk to the priest. She pointed across the street to an alley and said something like "Go down this street to the church, then go around the church, and over the bridge and across, then look for the house with three chickens in the yard." Seriously? We never did find three chickens but we did find the church office and a notice about hours.

We also found another poem on the side of a tiny old building by the path.

Then, we decided to bike west to find the location of the bike shop. We knew it would be closed but we decided to find it so we'd know for later. It also took us past this tower that we'd seen before.

This is a typical style of tower in many German towns.

Then we biked back to the town square (market place) which is not a square at all, but a triangle with two long sides and one short side. The short side has the city hall and some other buildings. In this photo that's behind the photographer The fountain is in the middle and here we are looking down the long sides to the point.  The fountain is topped by a rearing lion.

A nicer view.

Looking north from the fountain, the city hall (Rathaus) can be seen (beige and brown on the right).

Here's a pano view of the north short side of the market triangle.

And a pano view in the opposite direction. Cars coming from the south go to the east of the fountain (which is behind the photography) and cars going south go to the west of the fountain.

The road between the fountain and the city hall is the main west-east road. Can you find Andy in this photo?

Here's a shot of just this city hall.

Next door to the city hall is an outdoor ice cream shop. We sat and had ice cream and people watched for a long while.

Looking out from the eating area toward the market place. 

Then we biked back to the hotel atop the low hill south of the town. It was a gorgeous day!

We had supper at the hotel. Andy had "Henne und Hühn" Salat. Hühn is chicken and it had a lot of grilled chicken.

Amelia has the Schweinschnitzel "Jag Art."

Here are the sandals we bought today.

We decided we were too lazy to go swimming in the evening and sat on the balcony watching the sky change.

Sun is now down.

Moon is now up.

Day 32: Bike Bad Rodach

So today we slept late again. It was nice. We toddled down to a nice breakfast around 9:30am.We were not the last folks to show up for breakfast, at least. Like most hotels, the breakfast is a buffet of mostly cold cuts, cheese, breads, cereals, yogurts, jams, fruit juices, boiled eggs, and scrambled eggs. Amelia is fortunate to have a juice option she can drink here: grape juice.

It's a postcard perfect weather day! Here's the view from the front of the hotel toward the town in the valley below.

And, here's a view of the hotel. Our room is on the back facing the fields and forests. It's very quiet, except for the many birds.

As you can see, not so many folks here right now. The Thermalbad is on the left of the picture (the silvery looking buildings).

So, today we rode our bikes in a loop as suggested in the tourist cycling brochure. The map showed 19 kilometers and about 500 feet of climbing (mostly in the first half - uphill, then downhill for the second half). 

Unfortunately, the map was a bit vague about the actual names of the streets, even of how to get through Bad Rodach on the intended bath. But, we figured out more or less how to do that, but we had to stop pretty frequently to check the map against our location on google maps. It made for a slow ride in more ways than one. However, the weather was perfect. Once out of Bad Rodach, we found a bike path to take us to the next village, Heldritt. It was a nice wide paved path, but clearly hillier than the road it sort of followed. The views were lovely, though, mostly farmland.

We are wondering what this crop really is?

This sort of grain is most common here. You can see the undulating fields and meadows. We were going mostly uphill but nothing really steep.

We saw a few other folks on the path, mostly families with children cycling. We saw many wildflowers and lots of poppies.

So, we figured our way through Heldritt once the bike path ended at the village limit, and managed to stay on route according to google maps and the tour map. However, we were clearly expected to take a right turn upon leaving Heldritt and we did. This was clearly a country road, with some rough pavement, some farms and horses around. It was scenic but a bit rough. 

Then, the road ended and we had a two track path through the deep woods. We checked and double checked and we were really on the path the tour map said to take, so we ventured forward. We have no photos from this section because Amelia is the photographer and she was busy peddling slowly uphill in the mud and gravel, wondering how she suddenly became a mountain biker but thankful for her hugely fat tires on this terrain. We did a couple of very slow miles through this section and finally came out into dryer tracks and eventually into fields and back to a mostly paved path, shown below. 

Because we'd been steadily climbing we had nice views in all directions. Looking back we could see in the distance our hotel and the other buildings near it (the light colored bits between the dark green bands).

Zoomed here to show the roof of the buildings and to show that it was all uphill for us.

We carried on toward the next tinier village, Grattstadt, which doesn't even seem to have a pub or anything. It had very nice homes, though. Perhaps these folks don't want to live in the big city of Bad Rodach (big city = 6,000 population). The farms around the village are lovely, too.

This is Grattstadt.

With some difficulty we figured out how to get through Grattstadt's streets and stay on the planned route (no thanks to the tour map). We kept going slowly uphill again but the view north was quite magnificent and we could see giant windmills to the east and farms and villages and forests in all directions.

The path became a gloriously smooth way, with fields and trees here and there. And we made it to the highest point of the ride which was also roughly the half way point (6 miles). It took an hour to go 6 miles. Seriously. That's an hour of moving time, not counting time spent stopping to check google maps on the iPhone running up our international roaming data bill (priceless, that has been, in keeping us from getting totally lost while out on the bike).

After a short while, we entered deep woods. The trees here are very tall and the woods are very dark in places. It was so nice and shady and cool. However, we were now on unpaved dual track again and this time we were going down hill, sometimes sharply down hill.  Did we mention we are not mountain bikers (even though Amelia is riding a mountain bike in Germany)?  It was wild.

In some places it was bit muddy because of the rain all day yesterday and in some places there were potholes with water but we mostly avoided them.  We went straight down hill for about 3 miles. It was pretty awesome but also a bit scary since we are mostly road cyclists, not off-road!

Everywhere we bike in Germany we pass countless fields of whatever this is (wheat? hay? Some sort of grain...).

We went through another tiny village, Lempertshausen, climbed out to more farm fields, and we could see Bad Rodach not too far away. The path diverged from the road again and took us between fields until we got to Bad Rodach and returned to the roads yet again.

We entered Bad Rodach from the north west, and saw some streets and buildings we haven't seen before, including another stretch of the city walls and another wall tower here (left of center). We made it back to the center (i.e. where the city hall is) and biked back toward our hotel on the next hill.

Unfortunately, it was past 2pm which means no regular restaurant is going to be serving lunch. We stopped at the local Döner Kebab house but it was closed. It's not even open on Saturday and Sunday. What is up with that?  We biked on, thinking we might get some food in the eating part of the Thermalbad, which we intended to swim in afterwards. However, right before our last turn, Andy found this little Bratwürst shack. It was in a parking lot a block from the Thermalbad and next to a construction site and not much else. Folks were eating there, though, so we stopped and ordered grilled bratwurst with bread, mainly because we had no idea what the other things he had for sale really were. Note the orange flame! He's grilling in there.

It was rather tasty but the only cola available was this one Bad Brambacher, which is a mix of cola, orange juice, and lemonade. What drunk came up with that combination? Amelia couldn't drink it because of her orange allergy, so Andy had one.

So, there were were, sitting on a bench on the side of the road in our Super Grover jerseys, having Bratwurst. YUMMY!

Yes, he really does serve it in a bun and the sausage hangs out. No plates, either. Just a bun. He did have ketchup, though!

We then climbed the last little hill to the hotel and put the bikes back in the hotel garage, which is around the side by the kitchen. Certain times of day the smell is amazing in there!

As you can see, it was a picture perfect day!

We changed and went over to the Thermalbad and had an hour and a half of swimming in two different indoor pools. We did not swim outside because it was very sunny (Hello? Do you want to get skin cancer?) and the outdoor pools were really crowded.

This outdoor pool is connected to the indoor pool above. Almost all the folks were in the outdoor pool and it had live music going (a woman with a keyboard and mic) and the folks were dancing in the pool to the music. Clearly, they knew all these songs and dances. After the live music ended, a man came out with swim noodles for everyone and then lead a big water aerobics class. None of these folks were as young as we are! It was hilarious to watch.

After our swim, we walked back to the hotel for showers, then we walked back to the Thermalbad to try the restaurant upstairs. We ate outside. You can see the blue umbrellas in the photo above. That's the restaurant over looking the outdoor pools.

Amelia had Frankenwaldschnitzel which is cooked with a slice of ham and Gouda cheese on top, and served with a topping of cranberry chutney and a creamy mushroom sauce. It was heavenly.

Andy had the Hungarian paprika schnitzel which was also very good.

Like most German restaurants, this one serves ice cream. Andy had the combination selection.

Amelia had a combination of vanilla and chocolate. It was yummy. Germans are serious about their ice cream. Daddy would be proud!

Here's a view of the outdoor pools after supper.

After supper, we took a half hour walk through the Kurpark which is just below the hotel. It has paths, and a brook (we think it's a spring), and a pond, and benches and ducks and other amusements aimed at children.

Apparently, the Kurpark is only 26 years old!  It's a lovely place for a walk and to end the day.