Rothenburg; Sunday, 17 December, 2023

A second slightly unsuccessful nights sleep mostly down to the worlds worst pillow, but helped by another strong coffee. After packing my bag and leaving it with reception I checked out and headed back into town.

When I’d wandered past it the previous day the queue for the German Christmas Museum was very long and moving very slowly. It turns out that getting there when it opens at 10am is the best way to avoid the queues. The museum is housed inside an even larger Christmas shop which houses more decoration, cribs, ornaments and figurines than you could imagine even exist in the world – and it’s like that all year round – helping to give the city the reputation for being a year round Christmas fest.

The museum itself charts the history of Christmas celebrations and how the ideas of decorated trees, baubles, nativity scenes, advent calendars, greeting cards and even Santa and Krampus came about. There’s also quite a bit of stuff on that very German Christmas element – the nutcracker in the shape of a soldier.

All Christmas-ed out in the museum that didn’t stop me grabbing a quick bit to eat in the market before heading over to the town hall to climb up the tower and take in the views.

Over 200 steps later it turns out the worst part are the final couple of steps as they require you to step on two thin ledges almost making you lean over backwards over the near vertical ladder that you’ve just climbed up – getting up is bad, getting back down again is frankly terrifying.

With my legs still wabbling from the climb I headed over to my final stop of the day at the very christmassy Middle Ages Criminal museum which tells the history of crime, punishment and torture in this part of the world from the earliest forms of justice – and mob justice – through the official used of torture and forced confessions to modern justice.

After looking round the museum it was time to start heading back. In theory, if all the connections worked, I could easily have had another hour in town before catching the train, but the experience on the way in made me nervous so I headed back to the hotel, picked up my luggage and caught the 2pm train from Rothenburg.

In the end it turned out that I could probably have stayed later as the first two trains were both on time and the connections worked perfectly, with me able to get a good seat on the train from Würzburg back to Frankfurt before it filled up and headed back towards the German financial capital past valleys slowly filling with mist as the light started to fade.

Previous experiences in Frankfurt have shown that trying to get the S-Bahn from the Hauptbahnhof to the airport are not pleasant, especially on weekends when the quarter-hourly service has been reduced to once every 30 minutes. Thankfully the DB app had suggested a better route of getting off the train one stop early at the Südbahnhof, which is only a couple of miles from the airport, and catching the bus from there directly to the terminal.

The connection worked perfectly and less than 30 minutes after getting off the train, and a full three hours before my flight was due to depart I arrived at Frankfurt airport to start the last leg of my journey home.