Medieval Times

We spent the last two days of our Christmas road trip in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Germany. It’s a perfectly preserved German town that dates back to the middle ages. We loved it, and despite it being the most touristy town we’ve visited so far, it’s still very much worth the trip.

It turns out I’d been there before about 36 years ago when I was a kid on vacation with my parents. I recognized it right away — it’s very unique, which I didn’t fully realize the first time I went. When I came the first time I was a few years younger than James Wilson, and I didn’t realize how unusual the town was. It escaped being destroyed, or even damaged throughout centuries plagued by multiple wars and contains a dizzying amount of history, but as a kid it was just another European city in a long and fraught family vacation while we lived in Spain. On that trip my dad left his wallet in one of the restaurant booths and we drove all the way to Munich before realizing it was gone and had to turn back and ended up sleeping in the parking lot until the restaurant opened.

I had just told James and JW that story a few days before we arrived, not realizing this was the town, but as soon as we drove through the old town gate I saw things that were unmistakably familiar. While many European towns are quaint or charming, there really aren’t many that are perfectly preserved fortresses from the middle ages. But it was all the Christmas stores that I remembered the most. The town looks exactly like the one where the the Burgermeister Meisterburger lived in the 70s claymation movie “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town”.