Sunday, October 16, 2016

Homburg

On 10 September 2016 we visited Kathleen's cousins, Tom and Brianne and their family, and they took us out to Homburg.



Homburg is located in Saarland in southwest Germany. It is a beautiful area. Settlements go back at least to Roman times. There is a ruined castle on the hill, called the Schlossberg, that goes back to Medieval times.

You can see a long ways from the top of the castle ruins.

One of the surprising things is that the kitchen for the castle was so small. Yes, it is certainly bigger than our kitchen, but they were making food for the whole castle. The big round structure in the middle is a well. I could not tell where the oven was. Somewhere in this area Jacob cut his palm. Fortunately, I had some bandaids but trying to get a bandaid to stick on a three-year-old's palm is largely an exercise in futility.



From the remains, it is apparent that the castle was quite large. The castle would cover a couple of city blocks.



There are lots of stairs with guard rails but they can be fairly steep.



Some of the passages (like those shown in the picture below) are not very well lit (or not lit at all) and tourists would be advised to be careful because the stairs are not always even and there is some debris that it would be best not to step on, or climb on. A flashlight is helpful.




Even more to be avoided is the stinging nettle, which can be found in many places. Spencer found that out the hard way.





On one side of the castle (roughly east) there is a playground for kids. Unfortunately, I did not get pictures. The kids had a lot of fun on the zip-line.

There are also some caves below the castle, but the last tour starts at four so we just missed it; if you want a tour in English, you need to call ahead a day in advance.

Bathrooms are also scarce. We found some in the basement of a fancy hotel above the cave (on the east end of the castle) where they were getting ready for a big wedding party. It turns out that holding weddings at castles is a very romantic thing to do and thus seems to be popular.

Afterward, Tom provided some fabulous Döner, perhaps the best I have ever had.

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