Burg Reichenstein & Frankfurt Airport

A bit late with this post coz the internet connection at this big hotel was next to useless last night. Here’s yesterday’s post.

Ok we’ve got 2 days and 1 night to go.  Today we’ll drive to Frankfurt Airport, return Hermann, and check in to the Hilton Garden Inn at the airport which makes life convenient for our departure late pm tomorrow.

But first it’s breakfast at Bacharach and I thought it worthwhile taking the camera to breakfast because this place has an amazing setting, kind of medieval and with big paintings all around the room. Check it out.

And above the cold cuts and cheeses is this big painting of what Bacharach may have looked like back in the day. We know where the remaining towers and wall remains are so this painting knits everything together. Quite cool.

What a great place to stay was Bacharach.  So relaxing.  Of course staying in the right accommodation helps!  First stop today is just 8.kms down the road and it’s the big castle Burg Reichenstein.  We parked up 20m from the entrance and paid €5ea for the pleasure of a walk around by ourselves.  This castle is still being worked on big time.  There’s maintenance going on all over the place, with workman’s tools and leftovers everywhere.  The photos I took today were carefully structured to exclude all the ‘junk’ that was lying about. Add to that the fact that this castle is set up as a museum rather than a reconstruction and we both agreed that it would sit lower down the list of must see castles in Germany. Some people on Trip Advisor have raised about it.  All I’ll say is that they haven’t seen many others!  Anyway – in we go.
Remember the word from yesterday – portcullis!

Heading inside.
Ok … this castles hallways were stacked full of hunting ‘trophies’.  Regardless of the size of the beast, it was there. I’m surprised there are any animals left in the area. Crazy.
Yeah nah trophy dragon art??
The armour on the left reminded me of the Black Knight fight scene in Monty Python film the Holy Grail. No arm, no legs. 🙂
See what I mean about the trophies.  Are there any animals left around here??
Time for some Burg Reichenstein trivia:  Originally built in the 12th Century, and from the mid 1200’s a family of robber knights would prey on merchants carrying goods along the Rhine River, then retreat to their fortress on this steep hill above.  Eventually defeated in 1282 by their annoyed neighbors and the Hapsburg Prince Rudolf from the next castle down the river (Burg Rheinstein), the father of the clan asked that his 10 sons be spared. Rudolf generously offered that he would spare all of the sons the father could walk past AFTER his head was cut off. According to legend the robber knight’s will was so strong that as he took his first step and his head was lopped off, his headless body’s powerful legs strode past nine of his sons before finally falling to the ground. Believe it?  Or not! Well it’s ‘NOT’ actually. Sorry to ruin a good yarn, but the father apparently escaped whereas his companions didn’t, and were hung on the trees in the valley (as you do!).
A dining room from back in the day.
You guess..
An internal courtyard.
Well art.
Chapel door art.  They put this on a chapel door??  Oh yes that’s right – it has to be a doom and gloom scene.  Job done.
Door art.
A couple of decorative pieces
Ummm.. library??
Out a window.  Oops I got the tradesman’s electrical leads.More trophies plastering the walls. These hunting trophies were accumulated by the Puricelli family (who were one of Germany’s richest families in the 19th century). Baron Nicolaus Puricelli was a keen hunter and acquired over 1200 trophies from his trips around the world hotspots. Nothing better to do I guess.
We’re up a few levels now.  Heading outside for views.

Time for another trophy.  This one dates to 1875.  Not looking too bad at 140yrs old.
The castle has six French cannons which fell into German hands after Franco Prussian war of 1870/71.

Ok … a few more castle few pics before we hit the road for Frankfurt airport.



Portcullis!
It took under and hour to drive from Burg Reichenstein to Frankfurt Airport to drop off Hermann.  There was one last chance to crank Hermann up.  180kmph was best on the first open stretch before the 130 limit kicked in and later the 100 limit.  Then there was another open stretch but it was busy so we crawled along at 140kmph.  So getting to Frankfurt airport was step 1.  The GPS got us to the hotel which you have to drive past before looping back and into their car park.
We only needed to park up to drop our gear off and it cost €4.50 for the pleasure.  But look what was in the car park right next to us!

The view coming out of the lift on level 10 at the hotel.
It was time to have a major reconstruction of our luggage, packing as efficiently as we could with all the stuff we’d acquired.  Done!  We decided to go and check out the observation deck at Terminal 2.  It’s quite a hike to get there as we’re right beside Terminal 1.  But we already knew (after arriving at Terminal 2 at the start of this trip) that there is a free yellow shuttle bus that runs between the terminals. It was easy to find (we recognised the walkways and escalators), so off we went.  This was also a good ‘dry run’ for when we head across there tomorrow with our bags. So for all the plane spotters, here are a few snaps from the outside deck at Terminal 2.  btw you have to pay €3 for the pleasure of going out there, and there’s a full security check to go through.



Ok… all done. They kick you off the deck at 6pm.  Back to our room. We were curious to know how many rooms this hotel has so I sent Kath away to count all the rooms. She hasn’t returned yet.
Actually, she went to the supermarket (yes there is one inside this sausage shaped building) to get a few items for our makeshift dinner (to accompany the wine we needed to demolish).
Back in the room. They supply an ice bucket, and along the corridor there is an ice machine.  So there’s no problem keeping the wine nice and cold.  All we need now is wine glasses! Hello??  Dahh we’ll use these other glasses instead.
Oh yeah.. our hotel runs parallel with an outer runaway approach (the same one we arrived in on 4 weeks back), so right outside our window there are planes coming by really close.  BUT… you can’t hear them at all.  We have doubled glazed windows, plus there is the big outer glass shell that encases the building, so zero noise!  🙂  Here’s flight 891 from Helsinki according to Kath who was ‘spotting’ via the flightaware website.
Ok… that’ll do for today.  Quite a lazy day.  Sad to see Hermann (the 2015 VW Golf) go back to his owners Europcar. A great car to zip around in. Plenty of get up and go when you need it as well. They gave him a once over and passed him as all clear so we paid up in full, no ‘extras’.  We now await the speed camera ‘present’ later on once they receive it.  Hermann only had 20,000kms on him when we got him. We managed to add 2364kms to his clock.  Good job Hermann.

Right – post finally done. Off to breakfast and then we’ll head into Frankfurt for a look.