After waking up, getting breakfast, and learning that the winery we wanted to visit was closed, Lauren and I took a quick walk into Oberwesel to explore the town. One of the stores we walked into during our exploration stocked wine bottles that we had tasted the previous night, so we bought 3 bottles to ship home. They all came from the closed winery that happened to be just a few blocks away. It was unfortunate that we couldn’t visit our new favorite German winery, but we are extremely excited to have 3 bottles waiting for us when we return home! We continued our exploration of the town and took a few pictures of some old architecture along the Rhine before heading back to our castle.

While checking out, we were reminded to try and spend some time in the castle’s private gardens. So we set our bags aside and headed out the back of the castle,  down a narrow set of stairs, through a locked gate that we had just been given a key to, past a large swing for two that looked out over the Rhine and a small cave that housed a cement troll, and finally down a grassy path into the more open fields and terraces that made up the gardens. It was all very picturesque, with a giant chess set, a German version of bocce, tree houses, a greenhouse, and multiple small reading rooms with bookshelves in each of them. We felt like kids exploring a playground and had trouble pulling ourselves away so that we could start the drive to our next destination.

We left Oberwesel to head directly to Baden-Baden, but an hour into the drive, while Lauren was asleep, I decided to make a pit stop at Heidelberg Castle. This castle has been through a lot over the past 800 years: first erected in 1214, then being destroyed by a lightning bolt in 1537, rebuilt and expanded through 1650, damaged in multiple wars and fires (some of which were instigated by those living in the castle), being rebuilt once again, only to be struck by another lightning bolt!

One of the main attractions at the castle is a wine barrel. To give a bit of background, the lords who occupied the castle used to accept wine as tax payments from the wine makers of the region. Since they ruled over a vast area, they devised a special way to store all the wine they received. Their solution was not a wine cellar with many separate wine barrels, but instead, one giant wine barrel. So, they built a wine barrel that is over 7m in diameter and 8.5m long (in imperial units 21 ft and 27 ft, respectively). To this day, it remains the largest wine barrel in history.

The Heidelberg Castle also houses an apothecary museum that covers the history of pharmacists and pharmaceuticals from the early Greek empire through modern medicine. We didn’t have too much time, so we skipped over some of the more interactive portions of the exhibit, but we did try and read all the historical signs, which were very interesting and information dense.

Once we arrived in Baden-Baden and checked into the hotel it was already pretty late, so we went out to get a quick dinner and then walked around the downtown area a bit to find interesting shops to browse over the next few days. We were both pretty tired from a long day of traveling and activities, so we called it an early night and got some shut-eye for our big hike tomorrow.