Castles, castles, and more castles

After three days with our rental car, we finally figured out how to put the top down (it's a convertible). The directions were all in German, we were gonna grab a bellhop or something from the hotel to help us figure it out, but my suggestions worked so we didn't need to. This of course was the best day to figure it out because we took a scenic tour down the Rhine river which was totally studded with castles. Perfect weather, perfect day. Back in the day, there were like 300 different little kingdoms, many on the Rhine river because that was the best way to extract a toll from merchants. Many of the castles today are either restaurants, hotels, hostels, or private residences. Some you can tour through. Some didn't quite survive the many wars of the past few hundred years. My favorite was one that got destroyed.

Our first stop was Burg Eltz. It was a hike down a steep mountainside (or you could pay 1.50 for the shuttle) but the views were spectacular.

The castle was neat, it survived all these years without being seriously damaged in any attack, I think time has been it's worst enemy, but we are talking about hundreds of years. We were able to take a tour in English, and they only have some of the rooms available for tourists to see, but they were all done up right with original items decorating it. We ate lunch at a little cafe inside there.

We drove down the Rhine river and saw many castles from the side of the road, some I got some good pictures of, some not so much.

One of my favorites was this old castle that got destroyed by the French like 500 years ago. It's huge now, but I guess it's size today is nothing compared to what it was back in it's prime. For years they kindof used the place whenever they needed extra building material, and hauled stuff away, now it's just a shell. It's a monstrosity of a castle sitting on top of a cliff, and by the time we made our way up there (even with GPS we managed to take a few wrong turns)the guy said they were closing soon, and it was too late for us to get in. They had already closed the cash register (entance fee was less than 5 Euros), and they were going to close the gate in 35 minutes, but it takes at least an hour to explore the whole place. But I begged him to let us in and promised that we would be out by six, so he let us in for free with a warning that he would be locking us in at six. He wasn't kidding about needing an hour to explore the whole place. It was so awesome. I totally felt like a kid. The first castle was very "just look, don't touch", but this one you could explore your heart out. There were tunnels everywhere, I actually bashed my elbow on one of the tunnel entrances, and that hurt like mad for the rest of the day, now I just have a lovely purplish bruise. But this was one of those "We HAVE to take the kids here" places, but I told John we'd need at least 4 hours there, one to explore the whole place properly, and three to find the kids.