A Visit to Cologne Part 5: In which the author goes past the Prancing Pony, into The Hog's Head and through the wardrobe to a place called Bacharach.

Visiting Bacharach is like entering some Disney princess movie. Let me be clear about how cool this place is: There was not a single chain store to be found.

There were shops in and around this place that had nary a corporate logo anywhere. And I'm pretty sure I saw a princess and a bunch of small birds and mammals go running by in song. That was all before I stumbled into a wardrobe, met Elijah Wood as a hobbit and had a bottle of butterbeer at the Hog's Head. I'm sayin' this place is an idyllic faerie-tale land.

It's a small town along the Rhine, and best enjoyed going from the top down. The top in this case being a castle converted into a comfortable hostel.

That's where we started, and after taking the hike up the hill to get to our accommodations, I recommend checking out one of the taxis. It's not a bad hike by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not so fun with your gear. Once we got to the top we did not have a lot of interest in going back down in search of food. Luckily the hostel has a little cafe.

So we hung out and explored the building (and by explore, I do mean defend bravely with imaginary bows and arrows) I made an unending and unwelcome series of Harry Potter jokes and references. We wanted to get up to the tower (I had a letter to send by owl) but that's when we learned that everything has been converted to rooms, so there's not a whole lot to see from the inside.

After dinner we went to the "bar" (read "the place that was the cafeteria at dinner but is now a bar"). They served a pretty good variety of beverages, but it being Bacharach we stuck with items of the TWO MENUS PAGES of Riesling.

It's a white wine, and unlike my endless descriptions of Kolsch, I know so little about wine that I won't assume I'm passing on any knowledge here. I can say it came in three styles: Dry, medium and sweet. I take mine medium to sweet, Chris and Kelly leaned toward dry. Megan leaned toward grape juice made from grapes grown in the vineyard, which was really just as good as the wine.

This would be the first to glasses of MANY to come for the weekend because that's about all they serve in and around Bacharach. Wine, wine and more wine. There may be Kölsch or red wine around somewhere, but I didn't search hard enough, and I enjoyed trying out Bacharach's finest.

Plus, how often do you get to drink some tasty concoction and look out the window to see where the ingredients grew on the vine. That's the town in a nutshell: buildings on the inside, vineyards on the outside. Add cute old people riding on bicycles and you've got my stereotypical dream-view of Europe right there.

There was plenty else to see, but most of that came in the form of staring at interesting and distinctly European architecture and me forcing Chris, Kelly and Megan to pose for cute photos.

The one oddity of Bacharach (well, all of Germany really) was how fast and loose people played with the term "business hours." I wish I could work on a schedule like that. Sometime between 11:30 a.m. and 12 p.m. all the businesses closed up. Sometime around 2 p.m. they opened again. This trend was most pronounced in Bacharach.

We learned this the hard way around 12:15 when we searched for a bite to eat. There would be not bites or eating for us for another 2 hours.

After two nights and one full day in Bacharach (where we made many a joke referencing titles like "What's New Pussycat" and "My Little Red Book") we headed up to St. Goar. Our business hours lesson continued when we learned that the tourist information center closed on Saturdays. This wouldn't be so bad except we were relying on the center's free baggage check. So we carried our bags up to a hostel and threw ourselves at the mercy of a very kind local who let us dump our stuff in the facility's garage.

The castle was everything you could really hope for. Spires, walkways, dark corners. We did a walking tour from our travel book, which pointed out where they would pour hot pitch down on attacking soldiers. They seemed to indicate otherwise, but I'm pretty sure this place saw its fair share of orc attacks.

The fun part: there's really no where they won't let you go. There's no barriers saying "Stop, you might die here" at any point. We found one spiral staircase at the end of a long, dark, unlit hall. No one was there to say "don't go down there." We would have gone down, but for the fear in my heart. (bonus nerd points if you get the reference)

Now would be a good time to mention the numerous photos found at my Picasa site and also at Chris' Picasa site but be warned we overlap quite a bit.

Now, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, and if that were the case I should be able to get 70 entries in out about Germany, but I think people frequenting this blog (all two of you... hi mom) might get a little bored, so the next entry on Bonn will be the last.