When we boarded the 9:29am train at Eberbach, it was full, with students sprawled all over the seats and the floor, but amongst the chaos we managed to find two spare seats. At the next stop some people got on with bicycles and a group of students who were playing an amusingly intensive game of cards on the floor, had to abandon it, stand up and start squeezing into available spaces. There seem to be a lot of cyclists all over Europe, probably due to the high number of cycle tracks everywhere, but I couldn’t help thinking that they should have their own carriage on trains, as one person and a bike takes up a large area in an already crowded carriage, and it’s really not that comfortable having a dirty tyre pressed up against your shin. Hmmmph. The journey to Heidelberg took around half an hour and it turned out that Heidelberg has a number of stations and we didn’t know which one to get off at. So we alighted at the main central station, which turned out to be the wrong one, doh! Luckily there was a tourist information office outside the station and we were advised to catch the no. 33 bus back to the Altstadt (translation: old City…..that makes sense, how did we miss it!!!) and the very helpful information chappy sold us the necessary bus ticket, plus another ticket for the castle. We managed to get off at the correct bus stop and boarded the funicular railway that takes you up to the castle.
Schloss Heidelberg is a nice old ruin of a castle, but as with so many places that we’ve been to this year, a lot of it was wrapped in plastic and scaffolding. Still we had a good roam around and had our morning refreshments, plus pretzels, down in the vaults, next to the most enormous wine barrel, the Grosses Fass. It was made in the 18th C and holds 221,726 litres of wine; that would be handy at some parties, although I think the sign said it is currently empty.
There was also an Apothecary Museum in one of the buildings which had a fantastic collection of old equipment and was really quite interesting. We finally boarded the funicular back down to the city and wandered along the main thoroughfare, the Hauptstrasse, deciding to have lunch inside a restaurant as it was such a hot day. Then suitably fuelled up, we continued walking along to Bismarckplatz and onto the Theodor Heuss Bridge to cross to the north side of the Neckar River. Lots of students were spread across the grassy riverbanks, reading, sunbathing and sitting on their boyfriends; ah to be young again….
We wandered along the riverside to the Karl Theodor Bridge, the Old Bridge, and crossed back over the river in to the Old Town again. The gelato shop beckoned, and we succumbed; I tried an interesting combination of one scoop of pink grapefruit with one scoop of chocolate and it did work, I really liked it. Rodney played it safe with vanilla and strawberry. We sat in the shade on the steps of the Heiliggeistekirche to eat them and then we stepped across to a café for ‘cold beer time’.
Although it was still hot and we were getting a bit weary, we decided to meander around a few more streets before walking out of the old town to the correct train station. And we sat on the platform for twenty minutes, all the time dreaming about a nice cool shower back at the campsite.
At Eberbach we wandered through the old part of town and over the bridge to Eileen and it really didn’t take us long to grab our towels and get in the shower before bedtime.
