Originally this was to be our big day in Würzburg, but the only real item we had left on the agenda was to see the Marienberg Fortress, former home of the Prince Bishop high on the hillside, overlooking the town. We crossed the river to the west and made towards what we thought was the quick road to the castle. As we discovered over time, our path was quite winding, circling all the way around the hillside leaving us in a residential neighborhood some 270 degrees around the other side of the castle. From there we were able to walk mostly across the plateau of the hill, but somewhere along the way we'd missed the short cut to the top.
The fortress was certainly impressive from the exterior, and it made an imposing impression from the city below, but inside it was rather barren–both in tourists and furnishings the day we were there. Some of this may be due to the fact that the much of the Prince Bishop's possessions moved to the Residenz after that was built, and decorations may have also been lost in World War II, when the whole town was made ruin by American air strikes. As our tour guide at the Residenz explained, it was fortuitous that the so-called "monuments men," of the recent hollywood interpretation, came and rescued much of the interior decorations while taking pictures of what they could not remove for restoration reference and preservation of memories. The roofs of most buildings across the town were collapsed or destroyed in the incendiary attack, and restoring the rococo stucco-work at the Residenz took relearning the practice itself, which had been lost to time by the 1950s.
The Marienberg Fortress had been hit too, like everything else, but its walls were bare and relatively unimpressive from the inside. Perhaps most interesting were the maps and pictures of the city, both old and new, showing Würzburg over the ages. We spent a good bit of time studying the giant 3D models that were built to represent the town in the 17th century prior to the Residenz' being construction and in 1945 at the conclusion of World War II. The views from the high perch on the hill were also tremendous and gave us a reference to keep looking back at against the maps and pictures displayed in the gallery.
On our way back to the city, we discovered the shorter path, which let off in a small alley we'd passed right by on the way up. As we tried to figure out where we went wrong, we noted the signage for the castle was tucked away on the side of the building behind some other road signs. We had to know what we were doing a little more to have realized the cutoff was there. It certainly wasn't obvious.
After lunch we caught the train to Oestrich-Winkel, the train hub for those two very small towns on the Rhine, transferring quickly in Frankfurt. We were definitely in wine-land now, with vineyards covering most empty patches of land. I contacted Angela Kühn, the wine producer we'd be seeing the following day, to confirm our visit and get a recommendation on a good restaurant to eat, and she pointed us towards a great place in Oestrich: Altes Rathaus. Traveling early in the season, we'd run into very few people at the fortress in the morning, and the restaurant was empty till nearly the end of our meal. It was quite delicious though. We shared a salad with roasted feta cheese and peppers. Then my mom got lamb shoulder in a sort of Greek/Turkish cinnamon-spiced sauce over rice with tzatziki on the side. I got a rump steak with roasted vegetables. We split a bottle of Georg Müller dry Rheingau (the quartz-laden wine zone we were in on the north side of the Rhine) Riesling that was the best drink I'd yet to have on the trip, and we were plenty stuffed and content not to order dessert at the end.
After dinner, we walked up to the town of Winkel and back, checking out the quaint village while assiduously trying to avoid the goose poop that blanketed the path along the river.
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