Kassel; Sunday, 14 December, 2025

I should have spotted the previous evening quite how many people were staying at the hotel overnight as there had been large groups in the breakfast area munching down on pizzas when I came in, and for the next couple of hours there’d been kids running up and down the halls until someone said something very stern sounding in German and it all stopped.

So, I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was, that it was chaos for breakfast with more people than there were seats trying to pile their plates from the rapidly diminishing buffet that the staff were desperately trying to replenish whilst also clearing up tables. Consequently, it took quite a bit longer than I’d anticipated to get fed, packed and out of the hotel, heading first to the Hauptbahnhof to drop of my luggage.

From the Central station I caught a bus round to the city’s actual main station Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe where I was aiming on catching another bus up to the Schloß Wilhelmshöhe located in the hills to the west of the city. It turns out that rather than being a bus the number 24 is in fact minibus-taxis and very nearly let them go before spotting the board on the windscreen with the bus number and destination.

The palace was the former summer residence of the Landgraves and Electors of Hesse-Kassel when it was its own principality, but today it’s a large public park that stretches up the side of the hills, with many of the former castle buildings open to the public including my first stop the Greenhouse.

After looking around the different rooms of the glasshouse, I walked the short distance to the main palace building, originally built as three separate buildings and then joined by sweeping curved link buildings to form an elongated horseshoe shape. Today the main palace building is home to the Archaeological and Fine Art museum of the city with many artefacts from Classical civilizations on the ground floor and then three floors of galleries above.

Having looked round the museum and galleries, I headed out into the park in search of the Löwenburg, built around the same time as the main palace this was built as a pleasure palace and designed from the outset to look like a ruined medieval castle. To tour the inside of the buildings you must book onto a guided tour, which were all full for the day, but I was able to wander around the outside and the courtyard.

From the Löwenburg I walked the half mile or so down from the hill side to the nearest tram stop which took me back into the centre of town in time to make the earlier of the two trains back to Frankfurt that I was aiming for.

This turned out to be a good plan as whilst this train was very busy it was a long double deck train that missed most of the stops taking 20 minutes less than the train 40 minutes later that was single deck and likely to have been even busier.

My decision to take the earlier train proved to be even more inspired when I got to Frankfurt airport and was met with the massive queue for passport control. 45 minutes it took to finally get stamped out of the country; it’s almost like they want you to stay.

My flight was a little late leaving, but we made that up on the journey back and arrived back into Heathrow bang on time, albeit to the C gates at Terminal 5 and the furthest gate from the transit train at that, possibly the gate the furthest distance from immigration anywhere on the airport.