Day trip to Hanau and Bad Homburg 1-18-09

We set off for Hanau Germany today. This is the town where the Grimm brothers were born. They wrote most of the fairy tales that we know today like Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel and more. I didn't do much research but I fugured the town was small and we would come upon a museum. (You can go to this site to view the original versions of the fairy tales, not the Disney versions as we know today. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/grimm/

Hanau was much bigger than I first thought and we found no museum. There was a large downtown with a lot of shopping but nothing was open because it was Sunday.

We did find the caslte named Schloss Phillipsruhe. Schloss is the name for castle in German.

It has a public museum inside the main building but it was closed due to a huge bridal show. So we walked around a bit in the freezing cold rain and wind. The Main River (pronounced "Mine") runs along this town. This river also runs through the city of Frankfurt. That is also why we say we are from the "Main-Taunus area". Main is the river, and Taunus is the mountains in this area.

Behind the castle is a huge garden which is probably very nice in the summer. Today it was very wet and sloshy from melting snow. And very cold!! The back view of the castle was very nice.

More castle pictures:

This large iron gate was brought from Paris.

Front view of castle.

We saw some nice buildings and restaurants and a pretty church. The kids played a bit on a playground, but it was just t0o wet to have a whole lot of fun. Lia wants to come back when it's warmer.

John has decided he wants to take pictures of all of the beer signs he sees hanging from restaurants. Here is one.

Next, we drove to a town named Bad Homburg. This town is very near to us. Bad Homburg is one of the wealthiest towns in Germany. It is close to Frankfurt so that also makes it a popular place to live. It is a spa town hence the name "Bad" which means bath in German. Kings and queens from all over used to travel to this town for a dip in the healing baths.

We visited the town in the summer to go to the Roman Fort. I just recently read that it also has a lovely castle and a nice Kur-park with a Russian chapel with a small onion top dome and a Siamese temple so we decided to come back. It also has a very cute pedestrian only old town with lots of shops. It was Sunday (no shopping) but I hope to come back with a friend this spring to enjoy some shopping and lunch at one of the restaurants.

Anyway, we made it to the castle. It is quite large and from where we walked up to it we didn't get a good overall picture. Here is one I got off of the internet.

This castle is very large and can be toured via a guided tour only. There are 2 tours. One of the Emperors section and one of the English princess's wing. We chose the English princess tour. The tour was to be in German but we were very fortunate that we were with one other couple only and they didn't mind for the guide to speak in English. We totally lucked out. The kids were able to enjoy it much better also. This was the first castle I have been in that we had to put slippers on over our shoes. It was comical. We scooted around on these huge slippers. The castle was freezing also so we weren't able to warm up much. We have no inside pictures because we weren't allowed to take any. Here is a couple pictures that John took outside. One is of the Weisser Turm (white tower) and one is of the outside entrance gate. It was really raining and cold so we came home after the tour. We did not go to the park to see the chapel and the temple. I guess we will have to come back again!