A road trip to history

Today was the first of a few days on the road. We're giving the E-class rental a workout - we're off to Erlangen via Nuremberg to see Lisa, Shane's girlfriend.

Nuremberg (Nürnberg in German) is a very old city, and has been very important through German history. It was the unofficial capital of the Holy Roman Empire, the centre of the German Renaissance, and was chosen by the Nazi party to be the site of huge rallies and administrative buildings. Nuremberg was also the site of the famous Nuremberg Trials, at which German officials were prosecuted for war crimes.

The building pictured above is the Congress Hall at the Nazi Party Rally Grounds, a massive administrative building built by the Nazi's. The northern wing, below, is the Documentation Centre museum. We didn't have time to tour the museum, though.

Probably the most famous part of the rally grounds is Zeppelin Field, the site of the rallies themselves. It's largely fallen into decay, with a lot of what made the structure impressive already removed for safety reasons. The site is still used as a racetrack, of all things, with a straight blazing past the stands.

Despite it's decay it's an impressive structure. It's quite strange to look out over the raised hills, standing where Hitler himself stood, and imagine the might of the the Third Reich on display.

The next stop on the journey was into the center of town to Nuremberg Castle, a beautiful sandstone castle in the middle of town. It was basically built over the last 1000 years, and has a full-on moat and tower and everything. We saw the well, which took 10 years to carve down through the hill, and climbed the tower.

The steps up the tower were wooden, narrow and quite rickety feeling. It didn't help that the hand-rail was worn smooth, and a bunch of the steps leaning towards the middle of the tower.

Once at the top we were privy to a beautiful view of Nuremberg itself. The blue and white flag here is the flag of Bavaria; the black, orange and yellow one is of course Germany's flag.

I couldn't resist the urge to attempt a few street-style photos, with cliched black-and-white processing and everything. This is the only shot that really turned out though.

With this bit of history done, we're off to Erlangen and the Erlangen Beer Festival. That's definitely worth a post of it's own...