Tonight I sit sipping a pils in the hotel bar at the Best Western in Leverkusen, Germany. So far it’s descent. The hotel is old, and pretty worn, but I get the feeling it was the shit in 1978. During the day today I spent a good 9 hours learning how to wear my personal protective equipment in Germany (because apparently hard hats and boots work differently over here). Wasn’t a horribly stimulating way to spend a day in Germany.
Yesterday however, my co-worker and I spent the afternoon exploring the sights and sounds of Nurenberg. Believe it or not that was substantially more fun than watching a power-point on scaffolding and fork-lifts. The first place on our little mini-tour was the Rothenberg Fortress ruins. Of course this little visit followed the protocol of all my company-sponsored tourism: I knew nothing of the area or what I would go see until I arrived at my hotel that morning and Googled it, we had half a day to see everything we wanted to see, we got pretty damn lost on the way and ended up on some dude’s farm, and we saw what we wanted to see on a few hours of sleep stolen on our trans-Atlantic flight.
But of all the places to go for a sleepwalk, this place was pretty damn cool. It’s not every day one gets to explore a Medieval castle in the states, or any day now that I think about it. We had to take a guided tour to gain access to the ruins, and of course the tour guide spoke the Deutsch, so while he seemed quite informative, and based on the reactions of our fellow explorers, he was downright knee-slappingly funny by German standards, he wasn’t horribly helpful to either of us.
Apparently, this place doesn’t so much as have an English Wikipedia entry, and it seems Wordpress doesn’t like that I’m in Germany so it won’t let me put an actual link up in here. So if you want to read a little about this place, I guess copy and paste this link into your browser 2004 style:
http://www.schloesser.bayern.de/englisch/palace/objects/nbg_roth.htm
While I know next to nothing about the place, I did take a crapload of pictures, so, have a look.
The outer walls.
And in we go...
- What’s left of some of the inner walls… This place must’ve been a sight in its heyday
Our tour guide, woulda been really cool to understand a lick of what he said about the place...
Up on top of the fortress, which is located on top of a hill. It was impressively expansive up here, and downright cold.
The view from up top. The little town of Schnaittach off in the distance there.
More of the inner walls on top the fortress. Place was too big to do it any justice...
Descending into the innards of the fort... Kevin and his long blonde locks are doing their best to fit in around here.
Down we go.
Deep inside the annals of the fort. It was seriously dark and gloomy in there. The new camera can tell it's dark and leaves the shutter open longer, so the pictures are deceptively bright.
Ok... So this was either a joke, or they had some seriously daunting rodents in this place. That's a full-blown wagon wheel next to it....
Cannon. I definitely wouldn't have enjoyed trying to conquer this place...
I bet getting stabbed by one of these would be pretty fun.
More walls, and the sun if I'm not mistaken.
Um... Walls.
Do me a solid and click on this one so you can see the full-sized image. You can clearly see that this little lantern was made in China. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it's not original.
Lastly, what I'm guessing is an artist's rendering of what this place looked like in it's full splendor. Sucks to be the French.
Amazing pictures…and sunshine in Germany in late October!