After a week in Italy and 4 days celebrating Oktoberfest in Munich, Ana-Paula and I wound down our September holiday with a roadtrip along Bavaria’s Romantic Road.

The cheesy name of the route was coined by travel agents decades ago so, following our experience in Italy, I was expecting it to be rammed with geriatric tour buses. It came as a great surprise when a lot of our stops felt like ghost towns. Perhaps we missed the tour bus route because we travelled from South to the North, or it might have been the slow pace, but either way the peace and quiet was a great way to relax before flying back to the hustle and bustle of London.

The main attraction for us was castles; The Romantic Road winds its way through medieval towns and a variety of castles plain and grand. The grandest of all is the famed Neuschwanstein in the foot of the alps. This was our first stop and, unsurprisingly, the only one with a crowd of tourists. Although it wasn’t hugely busy, perhaps they got the memo about the original Disney castle being under construction. Much to our disappointment, a massive portion of the castle was covered due to restoration works. The area itself was beautiful, with the Alpsee lake playing host to swans and ducks framed by the Alps. Starting our journey with “the favourite meals of King Ludwig III and his Queen” seemed an apt way to kick off the rest of the trip.

There are a lot of towns on the Romantic Road, so the tour groups often whisk through a small number of them in a day. We elected to take our time and drive over three days with stops in multiple destinations. We did skip a few towns in favour of spending more time in ones we really liked.

Our trip took us though the following towns:
Füssen
Schongau
Donauwörth
Harburg
Nördlingen
Dinkelsbühl
Rothenburg ob der Tauber
Würzburg

Rothenburg, Dinkelsbühl and Nördlingen were the highlights for me. We were blessed with beautiful Autumn scenery all the way along the drive. At one point the road was closed and our SatNav really struggled to get us back on a road in the right direction, but detours are often the best part of a roadtrip and we were fortunate enough to stumble upon fields of sunflowers as far as the eye could see.

The Romantic Road is a beautiful route though Germany. It is probably more appealing to older travellers, but was a nice relaxing drive and a good way to wind-down following the madness of Oktoberfest.

I took some sunflower photos with two different focal points, turning the two photos into an animated gif presented a pretty cool result: