Day 13: Münster – Nürnberg

by bretzelitos

The original plan was to go to Cologne and visit Little Bretzel – but as he was not present and the train connections were still somehow impaired after the flooding events in the weeks before, we decided upon a destination change. We found a good replacement in Nürnberg that we visited already last year. The train connection was realised from Münster via Hamm, followed by a direct ICE connection to Nürnberg, taking all over around 4h30 of planned travel time.

A little incident on the high speed track between Kassel and Würzburg – fault of a switch – caused some 30 minutes delay as we were hold back in the train station of Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe. Otherwise the train ride was again uneventful. For the third and last time during this INTERRAIL trip, we went on this particular high speed track with a velocity of 250 kmh (=155mph).

We took a room in hotel MARITIM, close to the train station which – as we learned – is going to shut down in mid August as the building was sold to another owner and the lease contract was discontinued. We particularly liked this hotel in Nürnberg – next time, we need to look for a different place.

After some short refreshments we took a walk through the city center in fantastic summer weather and visited the historical Handwerkerhof where we took lunch – Nürnberg sausages with a hump of dark franconian beer. We continues through the city and returned to Hauptbahnhof. After a short ride with S2 (three stops direction Southeast), we arrived at Dutzendteich, a Park-Stadium-Lake area where we wanted to visit a creepy historical site – the so called Zeppelinfeld. At this site, the Nazi party has constructed a large area for their ‘Reichsparteitag’ events. It is as big as twelve full sized football fields. Thinking about all of the cruelties these people have done between 1933 and 1945, we visited the site in silence, took some photos for documentation and returned to Nürnberg’s inner city.

We took another circle through the ‘Innenstadt’ of Nürnberg, this time on a path which we have taken yet before retiring at our hotel as it was already late.