This past weekend Martin surprised me with a trip up the Rhine to see all the castles that sit along the river. The trip included a 5-course candlelit dinner in a castle and a night in a castle so I was pretty excited.
There are a lot of castles along the Rhine river in the stretch between Bingen and Bonn - over 40. It's a really nice drive or bike ride or boat ride to travel some or all of that stretch and see them all. With only a few exceptions, all the castles were built between the 12th and 14th centuries. For our trip, we stayed in the lower half (between Bingen and Koblenz) and we started our tour with the Rheinfels castle which is on the west bank of the Rhine.
The Rheinfels castle is mostly a ruin but you are given a self-tour pamphlet and you can walk around and see where all the parts of the castle used to be and there's a nice museum you can spend time in as well. There are also mine tunnels underneath the castle that you can wander around in - make sure you have an iphone light or flashlight because they're pitch black and the floors and ceilings are uneven.
Here's a picture of the castle from the other side of the Rhine. The only way to get a decent picture of these castles is to take one from the other side of the river and with a camera with a good zoom. This was the best I got.
Pictures from "inside" the castle:
Martin in the mine tunnels:
The view looking north:
Here's one of the other castles along the Rhine. We saw almost 20 castles while we were driving up and down the Rhine and in the hills surrounding it. It was really neat. I need to get back to this area and just take pictures of all the castles we saw (so, actually stop the car and take the pictures instead of just looking at the castles as we drive by).
Our next step was the Marksburg castle, which is the only castle that has never been destroyed. The only way to see the inside of this castle is with a guided tour, fyi. Below is the best picture I got of the Marksburg. The day became cloudy in the afternoon and the light just wouldn't cooperate but this castle is a beautiful white castle and it's really impressive to see it from a distance, especially if you can see it from the other side of the Rhine.
Some pics from inside the castle:
Looking out at the Rhine from the castle:
Next we headed to our hotel for the night, Burg Liebenstein. It claims to be the highest castle in the middle Rhine valley. The hotel rooms are in the gray tower in the pictures below.
Martin barely fit in our room:
And the door to our room was not only in the middle of a stairway, it also had the bottom of another stairway right in front of the door so you'd walk into it if you weren't careful. It sure was fun. And yes that stairway leading down from our room was very steep and narrow.
Here's Martin playing with some toys. All the souvernir shops had such fun things for kids! Wooden swords and shields, crossbows, axes, little foam maces.
And here are some pictures from our 5-course candlelit medieval dinner. They served "medieval" food, which meant we got a platter filled with meat, potatoes, and veg. It was neat.
This is the castle next door to Castle Liebenstein, Castle Sterrenberg. This was actually the view out of the windows in our room. These two castles were built closer together than any other castles along the Rhine. There's some story about a king building both to please his feuding descendants but I'm not completely sure if that's correct or not. Maybe only the king who built it knows.
Taking the ferry across the Rhine to get home! I had to sit in the car because it made me dizzy trying to take pictures with the fast-moving current around us and the boat twirling around. Martin found this amusing.
