Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Smokey Beers and Daunting Defenses

A few weeks after getting back from France, Bel and I decided to check out one of the gems in Germany - the town of Bamberg in Oberfranken, Bavaria. An important point for the unaware - although the town of Bamberg is in Bavaria, the inhabitants ARE NOT Bavarian, they are Franken.

The town of Bamberg is well known for 2 things - one we got to enjoy, and the other that we chose not to enjoy. The first is the Altes Rathaus (Old Town Hall) which sits perched on its own little island in the middle of the Regnitz river. The second of the two is smoked beer, but this just isn't our beer (meaning it's just not our thing).

Bel and I spent a fair bit of the day following a cache around town, which lead us to most of the interesting points and places to see...but didn't lead us to the cache itself. We're not really having too much luck with caches as of late.
Towards the end of the day we stumbled across a market in the middle of town which just happened to have a "Bio" stall where we were able to find all manner of things sugar and yeast free (yes, we are back on the diet again). Nearly 50€ later we had stocked up on spreads, breads, pestos, etc. and the weekend was well and truly saved (I had my sads on about not being able to eat anything...).


The next day we had planned to go to Nürnberg for the day, but a quick browse of our "Germany on a Shoestring" book the day before had revealed a fortification in the nearby town of Coburg that I wanted to see - die Veste. So we packed up our tent and headed off to see these daunting defenses that were never defeated.

After having a look around the fortifications, we walked down into the heart of Coburg to check out the palace, chill a little in the town square, and generally take in the ambience.


If you get the chance to come here, both Bamberg and Coburg are worth a day trip, IMHO. But make sure you have a designated driver, so that you can try out the Rauchbier in Bamberg - they say it's pretty good, but what would I know?!?! :)

Tschüß,
Brushy.

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