Wartburg Castle

When I was a kid I was obsessed with castles. I loved the design and construction of them, as well as the devices used to destroy them. I would always go to the library and look up books on castles and castle construction and intently look through them. It is the engineer in me. So after all these years it was nice to finally see a castle (the Disney castle doesn't count.)

Sunday morning we drove down to Eisenach. It is about 100km south of here. The weather was pretty nice and it was a pleasant drive. We found the castle and parked at the bottom of the hill which it is on. It was quite a walk to get up to the castle, we were struggling. If I was a soldier I would not want to lay siege upon this castle.

At the foot of the castle there was a stand to ride a donkey the rest of the way. Sean wouldn't do it. Instead we stopped and ate a bratwurst and drank a Coke. There was a short walk up the rest of the hill to the castle.

And then we were there. The second reason it would be difficult to battle a castle is that the view is just too good from up there, you would be distracted and then axed.

A bit of history: The Wartburg castle was the residence of St. Elisabeth and it is where Martin Luther translated the New Testament to German.

(A genuine drawbridge. I was disappointed that there were no giant spikes at the bottom of the pit.)

We made our way into the castle and tried to find where the tours are. Well, we found out there are no tours. They had an exhibition there on St. Elisabeth so we went through that. We couldn't take pictures in there, so I have none.

( There were these goofy looking turkey/dove birds in the castle.)

Upon entering the exhibition the girl checking tickets asked us if there is any of us who don't speak German. (We had been talking in English walking up to her.) She asked us that in German. What if none of us spoke German? Hmmm, anyways, Banuti explained to her that Sean and I don't speak German. She then told Banuti that he speaks very good German. Heh. People get so confused. We didn't correct the girl, she was too cute.

We saw a bunch of parchments with writing about St. Elisabeth and other St. Elisabeth related items. We also saw the room in which Martin Luther translated the Bible. Pretty interesting.

So after we had seen the whole castle we made our way back down the hill. After the castle we went to a local car museum. I'll post some stuff from that next time. So in summary. I like castles, castles are cool, we saw a castle, it was cool, I am happy:) -Eric