Since the weather was so awesome this past weekend I did end up visiting Castle Frankenstein! And I will say right up front, I had every intention of writing thing and giving really good instructions for how to get there because I was peeved that no Google search I did came up with remotely decent or faintly specific instructions whatsoever. I now know why.
That damn thing is on the top of a mountain, in the middle of the forest, out in who knows where. No seriously, no one knows where exactly. You can take the street tram from the train station out to the Frankenstein stop (which is the end of the line, btw) but you can't see the place anywhere around you nor does anyone who lives at the Frankenstein stop have any idea where it is. We were instructed to ask the Kiosk people back up a stop (at the Friedhof stop - the cemetery stop) and they said, oh, it's just around back and up the ways a bit. While we were walking around the back, we heard peals of laughter emanating from inside the Kiosk and genuinely hoped they weren't laughing at us - oh, dude, they were so laughing at us.
As we hit the first part of the forest, we thought everything was cool. It was sunny and happy out and there was the distinct feeling that we had walked into a Disney movie. (I was a little less convinced of this since three girls walking into a forest is usually a set up for a horror movie, and considering our destination, guess which I hedged my bets on.) Every time we'd hit a clearing we'd take a look up in the distance and see if we could spot a tower or something castle-like. Didn't see anything. So we kept on and eventually found a sign that mentioned Frankenstein - our first clue in half an hour that we were going the right way! And we puttered along, across a bridge spanning a highway and into the real forest.
The main danger in this place was the mountain bikers. The side of the mountain was a good 80 degree angle - about as steep as possible without being a wall - and endless. And the mountain bikers would plow down their as fast as they possibly could. (I found this to be incredibly dangerous to everyone involved.) So whilst dodging oncoming bicycles, we trudged along up the hill, eventually stopping at one point for a muffin break, naively thinking that we must be about a third or maybe even half way there. This is the part in the horror story where the person that keeps going, "We're almost there, guys!" falls into a trap hole and is impaled on spikes - or so I would wish, because we were not nearly there.
And in lieu of writing a paragraph about how my legs turned to jell-o and my lungs, with every wheeze, got closer and closer to being expelled from my body, I'll just say that we kept walking.
Eventually, we found a tree (oh snap, trees in a forest?!) with a poem stuck to it (oh, ok) that seemed to suggest that we were finally there*. And finally though the last wall of trees, we spotted grey stone and our destination (I totally know how Columbus felt now). And with that joy, we walked through the gates of the castle and... crashed a wedding. (This is the second time I've done this in Germany.) Someone was nice enough to direct us over there to the castle itself which was not part of the ceremony and all was well.
While I say that we found the castle, in earnest, it's really just ruins - I think I read somewhere that the castle was first mentioned in the 1200s so I'm suspecting that it was ruined more from age than from being attacked. I mostly think this mainly because I'd be way to lazy to consider waging war on a castle that far up a mountain. Just to give some perspective here, from the top of the tower, we could see the Frankfurt skyline which is about 49 kilometers or 30 miles away. We were really high up.
For as small of a space as it was, I took a ton of pictures. I'm so glad that I visited it - I feel so accomplished for having made it up there and having even found it in the first place. The woods were lovely and peaceful and it would be a great place for a picnic - clearly it was good enough for a wedding. And of course, on top of all of that, my inner geek is thrilled!
And instead of me copying the history from teh interwebs, I'll just link it
aquí. Now for pictures.
There are also more photos in a Facebook album
here, plus little descriptions.
*Also, I found a cat - there's a picture of him in the Facebook album. Well, sort of. He's very well disguised. If you can find him without looking at the tag, I applaud you!
Labels: germany, life, travels
