Prague to Dresden, Dresden To Frankfurt; Frankfurt to Burg Eltz (Round Two) and back; Frankfurt to Berlin

I’ll be honest; I’m getting tired of traveling. I have a pretty high capacity for spending time going somewhere (especially on a train), but the constant barrage of having to be on the move is starting to get to me. I starting to wonder if I’ve used up all that good karma that I built up driving the old ladies to church in the taxi…oh well, the wife(ish) is coming soon: she’s all the karma I need.

It might seem redundant to have gone back to Frankfurt, maybe even a waste of time, but I have figured out how to get to Burg Eltz castle in the meantime and being that I missed it last time I was in the area, it was calling to me, like, “You know where I’m at, you know how to get here, why not come and visit. You might never get a chance to again.”

As always the Siren song wins every time.

Stayed in Frankfurt for the night and headed out the next day to find this place. Leaving the rural train station after arriving in the small town, I started with the map that was displayed at the station…the thought did occur to me at the time that the map might not be to scale, but I figured that I might as well go since I had come all this way.



The map was not to scale…and the first route I took ended up taking about two and a half hours going up through the foot hills of the Rhine Valley only to plateau on a vast prairie farmland with expansive fields.



The deceptively distance-less signs kept on pointing the way, and on and on I went, through the farmlands and back onto a different hiking trail. I eventually found it, and it was amazingly well preserved due to never having been sacked or destroyed. The reason for this fact as near as I can tell is that it’s such a pain to get to and in such an un-strategic spot that no one ever felt the need to try and take it.







It was fun to see, but the tour was all in German (which I had been misinformed about), and I was realizing that I wasn’t going to get back in time to get as much homework done as I wanted.

On the two hour hike back to the train station the karma completely seemed to putter out as the downpour began.

Soaked the three hour train rides back to Frankfurt were less than enjoyable.

Now I’m on the train to Berlin. After seeing all the recent history in the Czech Republic involving the Holocaust and the end of the Cold War, I’m ready to slow down on the history…oh wait…Berlin…the center of conflict and contention in the world for the last half of the 20th century…whew. I’ll make it, and please don’t take this to mean that I’m not happy and blessed to be here, I am; however, ready for a little bit of normalcy with the wife(ish) in an English-speaking, Dollar-using, Mt. Dew-producing country.

“Mama, I’m coming home.”
-Ozzy Osborne