On May 10, after visiting Jesberg and saying goodbye to the Kassel region, we drove south towards Wurzburg. Wurzburg was actually not originally on our itinerary. In planning our trip, I had initially confused the Schopfloch in Baden with the Schopfloch in Bavaria and made plans to stay in Stuttgart to be closer to the Baden Schopfloch that is, the wrong one. Fortunately I discovered this mistake in time, cancelled the Stuttgart reservation but still had to pay….
I knew nothing about Wurzburg except that in studying the map, it was the closest bigger city I could find to the Schopfloch in Bavaria where my Nussbaum ancestors had lived. It was meant to be simply a one night stopover before we headed to Schopfloch. Now we saw forests of tall trees on either side of the Autobahn. It was a dramatic change in scenery. We arrived in Wurzburg around 4 pm and checked into our hotel, the Hotel Wurzburger Hof, having no idea what to expect of the hotel or the city.
Well, this quickly became our favorite hotel of the entire trip. The young woman at reception checked us in and then offered us a free glass of wine. On top of that she told us that they had given us a room with a private roof deck overlooking the city. We took our bags and our wine up to our room, dropped our bags, and took the wine out to the roof deck.
It was big enough to host a party for twenty people, and there was plenty of patio furniture out there. The room itself was also very comfortable, clean, and beautifully furnished. We sat and relaxed, perhaps the first time in our trip that we had no appointments or sites to see or cemeteries to visit. When it was time to eat, we asked the receptionist for dinner suggestions, and she recommended two restaurants on the river. She smiled and told us how to get to the restaurants on the Main River.
We picked the Italian one of course and had a table overlooking the river; the food was as good as the view. One of the many good Hefeweizen beers I had in Germany. After dinner we strolled around a bit and noticed that, as in the restaurant, the streets were filled with young people. When we returned to the hotel, we asked the evening clerk why there were so many young people.
