This is part of a series from our recent travel to Europe in June/July 2026.
It’s been that kind of week. Nothing dramatic, nothing anyone’s done wrong, just the slow accumulation of long days, short nights, and a trip that’s now three weeks deep into asking a lot of everybody. Jamie woke up with a migraine and wasn’t up for an early start, and honestly, none of us were moving at full speed. Some days you’re all in. Other days you’re just getting through them together. This was more the second kind, and that’s fine. It happens on a trip this long.
Chris and I slipped out for breakfast inside the city walls at a place called Café Einzigartig, really good coffee, breakfast that did its job without asking for applause. I got a haircut afterward, which felt like a small, satisfying way to mark three weeks on the road, and then we met back up with Jason, Jamie, and Izzy before checking out of Rothenburg for good.
We had a little time before we needed to be on the road, so Chris and I climbed up onto the city wall and walked a stretch of it, one of the things Rothenburg does better than almost anywhere else we’ve been. The wall is nearly two kilometers around, and you can walk almost the entire loop above the rooftops. We passed through two of its 48 towers, and it’s hard to overstate how intact the whole thing is. You’re not looking at a reconstruction dressed up for tourists. You’re walking on stone that’s been doing this job since the Middle Ages, and it still feels sturdy enough to do it for another six hundred years.
One stray fact that stuck with me: the bakery Jason and his family stopped at that morning has been in continuous operation since a date that predates the founding of Australia by ten years. There’s something about German towns that makes American ideas of “old” feel almost embarrassing.
With bags loaded, we made a brief stop down at the Tauber river, just long enough to take it in, before pointing the cars toward our real destination for the day: Oberwesel, on the Rhine, a few hours north.
Lunch was in Bad Rappenau, a town whose main claim to fame, as far as we could tell, is a bikini museum, which is a genuinely strange thing to learn about a landlocked German town. What we thought was a beer garden turned out to be more of an attachment to the gas station it shared a parking lot with, and the food matched the setting: edible, forgettable, the kind of stop you make because the timing works, not because anyone’s recommending it.
The drive after that redeemed the day almost entirely. Once we picked up the Rhine, the road just runs alongside the river for stretch after stretch, and it’s the kind of scenery that makes everyone go quiet and look out the window. River cruise boats, Viking among them, moved past in the other direction, and castle after castle appeared on the hillsides, the kind of thing you see in photos of Germany and assume must be exaggerated. It isn’t.
Chris had found our stop for the night, and it might be the single best piece of trip planning either of us has done: Schönburg Castle, in Oberwesel, where the rooms aren’t near a castle or styled like a castle: they’re inside one. An actual, centuries-old castle, with a room key that opens onto a hallway that used to be part of a fortress. It’s a little absurd, in the best way. Outside of the Eiffel Tower lit up at night, this was the most excited I saw Izzy get on the entire trip, and watching a twelve-year-old on her first trip outside the country realize she’s sleeping in a castle is a pretty good reminder of why we’re doing this at all.
The rooms were cozy, in the specific way old castle rooms are cozy: low ceilings, thick walls, character over square footage, and dinner on-site turned out to be genuinely excellent, which is not always a guarantee when “we’re eating at the castle” is your only option.
After dinner, Jason and the family headed back to their room, Jamie still wasn’t feeling up to more, and Chris and I wandered through the castle’s “secret garden,” which seemed to unfold longer than it had any right to, path after path opening onto another quiet corner. Along the way we picked up the legend of the Seven Virgins of Schönburg, one of those local stories that’s been softened and retold so many times nobody’s quite sure which version is the real one anymore, and took some photos in the last of the evening light.
And then, walking back, Chris’s phone rang. His aunt had passed away about thirty minutes before the call came in. He stepped away and spent a while on the phone with his cousin, Sharon, working through it in the dark of a castle courtyard a very long way from home.
It’s a strange thing, grief finding you in a place this beautiful. The day had already been asking a lot of everyone: tired legs, short tempers held in check, a group of five people three weeks into living out of suitcases together, and then it asked for something heavier on top of that. We didn’t have any answers for it that night. We just sat with it, together, in a castle on the Rhine, and let the day be what it was.
