Sunday, June 29, 2008

Castles, Castles Everywhere

We've kind of stalled on our touring of the countryside, so this weekend we ventured out to find a castle we had heard about, Burg Eltz. Along the way, we saw some other castles in the hillside.


One castle we happened upon was Burg Ehrenburg (from a distance.) This is close to Nurmburg which has a race track around it. We visited it as well, but it deserves a whole post on its own so I will try to post about that in a few days. Let's just say, some people are crazy and you'll understand why later.




Burg Pyrmont is the other castle we saw from the road. We didn't walk around this one either, just enjoyed it from afar.



Onto Burg Eltz. It was only about a 45 minute drive from our house. They are all located near the Mosel River and there are about 6 castles along a 46 mile stretch. One of the other castles I have posted about before, Cochem Castle, is along this route as well.

Burg Eltz was spectacular! We didn't expect there to be as many people as there were there, nor did we expect to hike down quite a 2km steep, let me repeat, STEEP hillway to get there. Once you did the walking though, it was worth it. Well, actually walking down was easy, it was back to the car that I had to bribe Hayden with 1 Euro if he could beat me to the top. Amazing how that lights a fire under a kids hind end and they suddenly have all this bottled up energy.








Of course everything is in full bloom and its right along the river. We didn't pay to do the guided tour, we've experienced that before with the 3 kinders and it didn't turn out so well. We were able to walk in and out a few places though and all along the outside. They had a couple of little restaurants and of course a souvenir shop. Overall, I would say this is one of the prettiest castles we have seen, if not THE prettiest. We plan on taking a picnic and doing some hiking there again sometime in the future. .

3 comments:

Terri said...

I want to go to a castle!!!!!!

Leigh Ann said...

those pictures are great, what a fun time it looks like you guys had.

Shannon said...

Wow! I would love to see that in person one day. That is so neat that you all go on all these adventures. It looks beautiful!