Today was a long day.....but we did something new, at a place we enjoy going - this is the fourth time we've visited Heidelberg & Heidelberg Castle. Typically when you visit Heidelberg you go to the castle ruins - the highlight - and you walk around the town. It's a huge college town with 4,000 students in attendance. We've seen it offered before but we opted today to have lunch with the students. I'm not sure if that was the reason or not, but the usual routine is the bus takes you to the castle high atop the hill. You walk around and have a guided tour. Then the bus takes you down to the town - not more than 15 minutes. But for some reason today we drove right into town and walked around for an hour. Then had lunch with the students. Then the options were to either have nearly three hours of free time; take a FORTY minute bus ride to the castle - tour - 40 minutes back down; or walk up the steps to the castle on your own. Considering we'd driven nearly 2 1/2 hours to get there (and had the same ride back) we didn't like the idea of adding two more 40 minute bus rides to the day. And for us, three hours of "free time" - after having already had lunch, there are only so many shops! So we walked up the 315 steps to the castle, took some photos, walked back down the 315 steps and did a little window shopping then waited about 45 minutes for the bus to arrive to take us home. REALLY enjoyed meeting "Jess" our student that sat at our table. She is from India and majoring in Economics - so, having taught Econ we had that in common. She was very interested in how we'd all met our spouse as she'd just met her boyfriend a month ago. It was a wonderful lunch. The castle didn't disappoint, though we missed out on the stories told by the guide - our first guide several years ago spun the best stories and no one has lived up to that yet.
Tomorrow we have another long day as we travel from Frankfurt along the "Romantic Road" to the quaint town of Rothenburg and it's fortress.
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