Jakob's Castle - Burg Eltz

Owned by Prince Elect Jakob Eltz III. This is the most complete castle in Germany and many believe the best castle to tour in all of Europe.  We agree.  The treasure trove was awesome!  We were so engrossed by the amazing amount of medieval artifacts and treasure that we only took a couple pictures.  The tour of the castle was also awesome, but because it is considered a museum we were not allowed to take pictures (other than the suites of armor and weapons we snuck in before he told us no pictures).

Castles, Castles Castles... and a boat

Today we spend 6 hours on a boat going upstream (South) on the Rhein River.  It has more castles over such a short stretch of land than anywhere else in Europe.  We saw about 30 castles and probably 50-60 old catholic and protestant churches in addition to a ton of cool old watch towers and even the famous Lorelei statue.

This is the agenda for the trip.  You can see the major castles. We started at the very top at Koblenz and went all the way to the bottom at Rudesheim where we spent the night.

Our Boat

This section of the river is very dangerous.  The sailors have historically blamed the Siren Lorelei for their trouble navigating the many rocks in the river.  It is still a very dangerous section of the river.

Notice the castle tower's on the rail tunnels.  There are a lot of tunnels in this section, it was a nice touch of the people in this area to add the castle accents to the tunnels.  

This castle is currently a youth hostel.  You can stay there if you want!

This is where our camera died, but luckily this was the last of the really cool castles.  Since out boat was running behind, we missed the last train back to the town we were staying in so we spent the night in a cute little hotel in a small village just South of this castle.  The hotel was named after this castle RheinStein. 

Neuschwanstein

This is the castle that Walt Disney used as inspiration for the castle in Sleeping Beauty that is now the castle you can walk through at the park and also part of the logo of Disney. It is a pretty castle, but the newest of all the German castles built in the 1800's by an eccentric Bavarian King. It was pretty, but it doesn't have the history of the other castles and because of it's pop culture popularity, you have to make your way through a mass of humanity to see anything.  Would have had to wait 3.5 hours for a tour of the inside (of a castle that doesn't have much actual history).  We just took pictures of the outside and moved on.  The Yellow castle was the summer home of the Royal Bavarian family for a long time before the Mad King build Neuschanstein. The two castle are only about a mile and a half apart.