Frankfurt to Heidelberg

We flew from London to Frankfurt on Monday, no problems. It is so much easier to fly into the EU than either the US or UK where they need addresses and ask you why you are visiting. Here they stamp your passport and that's it. Because we were coming from the UK (presumably) there was not even any customs people there. Everyone could just go straight through. So we go out, and get out Europe car and got a free upgrade which was good because the guy said that our luggage would not have fitted in the smaller car. We then bought a detailed map of Frankfurt and a map of all of Germany. Off we headed to find the hotel. It was really easy as the map was good and all the roads are signed really well. We found the hotel - really nice and this was the view of Frankfurt. We found the bar and had a few beers with a Greek/German bartender who was really funny and cool and had hardly any English. We had a few beers, had dinner in the restaurant with wine, then back to the bar for 3 snapps each. We were rather happy! It is good to be relaxing and not having to think about work. That will have to change in a week or so.

The next day we took off at about 9:30 and headed south on the autobahn - at 150km/h or so. Any slower we would be run over by all the other cars. There were 3 or 4 lanes so we could still go in the second slow lane and watch some cars whizz by at unbelievable speeds.

The only place we decided to stop was Heidelberg. We drove in and through the town and up the hill then found the carpark. From there we walked up to the castle.

The view over the town and river was wonderful.


This is a wine barrel that can hold 228,000 litres of wine. It was built in the castle but started to leak after a while so does not have wine in it now. To get a sense of the scale, look for the people in the next few photos.






The apothecary museum was in there too.




We walked down the back stairs - 315 of them.


It was fabulous and we highly recommend it - but apparently not in summer with 3 million tourists.

So we got back in the car and drove around the town for a while then headed back to the autobahn and south again. Found some pretzels in a gas station along the way. So German!