May 25, 2018 – Day Ten – Klotten to Kreuztal

May 25, 2018 – Day Ten – Klotten to Kreuztal

Our convivial host has our breakfast all prepared for us when we come downstairs, just before eight o’clock.  We’ve got one load of baggage to take to the car before we eat and he opens the front door for us.  His lovely wife has already gone to work, but he is undaunted.  There is a tray with three kinds of meats and two cheeses, and a large basket of hot, fresh rolls.  There is butter and jelly and he brings coffee as soon as we sit.  He also teaches us that it is improper to break off a piece of roll.  We are supposed to cut it in half lengthwise.  I don’t know if we’re supposed to make sandwiches then;  but that’s a lot of bread, so I make mine open faced.  There are also little crocheted chickens, and it turns out they are egg cozies!  Such fun!  As we are winding down, he added two little containers of Nutella to our jelly basket!  Dessert!!

He walks us out to the car as bring down our wines, and helps Marilyn back out of the tricky parking area and onto the narrow, winding street without getting hit!  We’re off to Rick Steve’s favorite castle in all of Europe, to see what draws him to it.

Tiny little twisty roads!

And through the tunnel

that's about as wide as our car!

And lots more grapevines!

The drive to Berg Eltz  (berg is a castle and Eltz is the name of the river that surrounds the castle, and the family that settled on it) is only about half an hour, and, although we have a couple of different sets of directions, we really just follow the brown signs and arrive in the parking lot with no hiccups.  We pay to park, stash the car, and walk a short distance to where the shuttle bus picks us up.  It’s only two Euros for the drive up and worth the money since we don’t know quite how far the hike would be!

Tricky Ricky had said to arrive before eleven to avoid the queues and we’re here about nine thirty.  Perfect!  There is hardly anyone here and when we purchase our tickets we find that an English tour will begin in just six minutes!  You can’t take photos inside the castle, so we use up our time with outside shots.

Our guide is knowledgeable and speaks wonderful English with an engaging accent.  We learn that the castle was built by Count Eltz in 1157 and that as the three children started families of their own the castle was enlarged to actually be three individual homes.  There is a council room where the families could come together to make decisions that would affect them all.  There is a jester’s mask because the jester was the only person who could speak truth to power.  It symbolizes the fact that anything can be said here without fear.  There is also a rose that symbolizes the fact that nothing said within the room will be repeated outside it.

Through the centuries one of the families died out;  later, one of the remaining two decided they wanted to move to a castle of their own and they sold their interest to the remaining count.  His line still owns the castle and either the current count or his son visit about once a week to check on things and to supervise the ongoing restorations.   There have been thirty-three generations of Eltzes in continuous residence!  The last countess loved flowers and for forty years she personally placed fresh flowers in many of the rooms.  She is now ninety-seven and no longer is able to do this;  there is a flower shop in town which now takes care of it.

One of the rooms is called the Children’s Room because there are four or five paintings of various family members as children.  The fashion of the time required that the children be painted as though they were small adults and it is quite jarring to the modern eye.

Another room contains lots of old weapons – arrows, bolts, suits of armor, halberts, and miniature cannons.  When a customer ordered a cannon, the minis were used as demos so the buyer would know what he was ordering.  When the cannon was delivered, he also received the miniature.  They are about two or three feet long.  The current count collects these miniatures and there are about a dozen in the rooms we saw.

There are eighty rooms in the castle and forty of them have fireplaces!  And there are twenty toilets, even though there was no running water.  The waste ran down a stone pipe into a large collecting tank that – someone – had to clean out!

There is a chapel that is Gothic, indicating that it was part of the newest addition to the castle.  The actual altar is in a bay window, so that no one would live above God.  This is seem in a smaller worship space in another part of the castle and was common practice for centuries.

The castle is unique in that it has never been destroyed.  It was only besieged once, and eventually the family agreed to be subjugated by Balduin of Luxembourg, the Archbishop-Elector of Trier.  This is particulary interesting because after a time, one of the Eltz counts became the archbishop of Trier! The Eltz family also includes another archbishop, one of the seven “under kings”, making him second in line to the throne!

When the official tour is over we are also allowed to check out the treasure rooms with lots of gold and silver ornaments, china place settings, traveling religious artifacts, games, jewelry, etc.

The Eltz River surrounds the castle on three sides

This man and his dog were walking the castle grounds; but to get off the island he had to unlock a gate.

And, of course, there are not one but two restaurants.

Notice how the castle incorporates the native rock.

Back outside we take a few more photos, then take the bus back to our car.  We’ve spent about three hours here and can see why Rick is so fond of it, especially since it has such a personal history.

We are embarking on the journey to Kreuztal, where we will finally stay in the house for which we exchanged!  At first blush “you can’t get there from here”;  but we are undaunted.  There are four different Autobahns involved and some of the interchanges happen on the part of the map that is covered by a yellow blob representing a city!  But the signage is good and there’s only one minor misstep until we get really close to Kruetzal.  It gets a little hairier then;  but we stumble onto a police station, where a young, blue-eyed blond looks up our address on his computer and gives us directions.  He only has to draw a traffic light and a tunnel.  Everything else he communicates in English!  And it helps that Marilyn can offer a bit of Deutsch.

We were really close!  Less than ten minutes later we can turn off the car!!  Apparently there are two apartments in the house and we have the second and third floors.  We learn later that there is no one in the downstairs unit and I think Henning and Kirstein own the whole building.  We bring in as much as we can in the first trip, since we’ll be here until we leave the country, except for day trips.

The front door has a lock, of course.  The door to our unit has a lock, of course.  The WC that is outside the door to our unit has a lock.  Hmm.  Why is it there and why is it locked?  Many of the interior doors can also be locked, like the dining room and the family room, and the kitchen.  Hmmm.  The interior seems to have all been recently and beautifully redone and is lovely.  Marilyn will have the master bedroom and I’ll take the other bedroom, which is upstairs.  The only other space up there is the landing/office and another locked room which we don’t investigate.

First things first – we try the internet.  Nothing happens when we enter the sixteen-digit password.  I go upstairs to double check the password on the bottom of the modem and realize that there aren’t any lights lit!  Aha!  Plug everything in and we’re in business!  I can do IT!!

We look up a Chinese restaurant, but don’t quite get there.  Never mind, we know where there are three different grocery stores and an Italian restaurant!  We go to the Lidl, with which we’re familiar from Poland and buy enough supplies to get through the next day or two.  Then we stop at Ducato, the Italian restaurant, the find that the menu is all in German and our waiter has no English.  Again, never mind!  Marilyn wants water without bubbles, I can mine “no bubbles” and her drink arrives.  I guess he didn’t think I wanted a drink.  Wrong!  I want the local dark beer!  We also know what schnitzel is and I find one with “champignon” sauce and why mushrooms are called by their French name I don’t know, but that’s what I want!  Marilyn get schnitzel with a sauce that looks like it might be picante and it rally is!  The portions are huge and when we mime “take home” he gets is right away!

Home again and we open a bottle of Reisling from the Mosel valley and settle in for the night.  Live is good!