Europe - day 5

On Monday morning, we drove west of Frankfurt to some small cities in the Rhineland-Palatinate.  Our main objective was to tour another castle, Burg Eltz.  The castle was a little out in the middle of nowhere, between Cochem and Koblenz.  We had a short half mile hike to get to the castle; loved the setting in the forest.  Burg Eltz is a fairy tale-like castle that has been in the Eltz family for over 800 years.  Unfortunately it's undergoing renovation (notice the crane & plastic covering one side of the castle) so we didn't get to see all of it, but what we saw was very cool.  A couple of interesting things we learned - they built mini chapels in bay windows because they believed that no one should live above God (they could place these on lower floors because of the bay window extension).  Also, we learned that the spiral staircases were designed specifically with protection in mind.  Intruders would have to hold their sword in their left hand while going up the stairs while the homeowner (castle owner?) had the advantage of being able to hold their sword in their right hand while coming down towards an intruder.

I hope you're not getting tired of the arm's length photos or my blue-green jacket.  :)  The jacket shows up quite often; I didn't expect to wear it very much, but it was chilly or rainy enough to need it most of the places we went.  You'll probably be castled out by the time I'm done too - I'll admit I wasn't interested in seeing any other castles after the ones we saw (and we didn't even tour all the ones we took pictures of).  But we did enjoy each of them.
 

We took over 2000 pictures on our trip, so I really had to pick and choose.  Here's just a few things from inside the castle.  And I had to include a picture of our dessert - so yummy.  I don't remember the names of our cake/pie (everything was in German - we did a lot of pointing... we'll take one of those.)    :)

The little town of Cochem was another favorite of our trip, where we stayed at a bed & breakfast on Monday night.  The Mosel River ran through the city, which was filled with touristy shops and restaurants.  It was fun to walk across the bridge and watch the boats and the see the reflection of the brightly colored buildings in the water.  We walked along both sides of the city - on one side was the Cochem Reichsburg Castle and the other was filled with vineyards (and shops and restaurants).  We enjoyed walking up above the vineyard and just gazing out over the city and to the castle on the other side - very peaceful and romantic spot...  ;)

The cool little orange car was just something we saw while out walking - we saw so many little cars while in Europe.  In fact our rental car in Scotland was a little mini thing.  We didn't see very many big cars, trucks, or vans in Europe.  
 

We didn't actually tour this castle - it was after hours when we got there, but it was fun to explore the outer courtyard area, and also provided another great view of the city.