Rothenburg wall

You'll see that the wall isn't very high but it's there so you might as well walk it anyway as you don't often get to visit a town with walls around it. Hard to believe that at various times in history towns had a need to keep hostile invaders out. Europe is littered with castles which bear testimony to those dark times.  I think we joined the wall at one of those town gates with the pointed towers that show in some photos.

As you can see the walkway isn't very wide and you may meet people coming the other way

You get a rooftop view from up here. 

Here's the bell tower we had climbed earlier

Some storks nesting on this next rooftop (bottom right)

A German cat relaxing on a patio chair

After an hour slowly strolling the wall we came back down to street level and visited what is probably the most photographed street scene in Rothenburg .....

Our next stop would be St. Jakob's church

What really interested us here was some woodcarving by a master of that art- Tilman Riemenschneider....

 A hammer, a chisel and a solid block of wood...

We normally limit our souvenir buying to fridge magnets but in Rothenburg we bought a cuckoo clock which was actually made in the Black Forest region. It's still going strong 12 years later. We had it shipped back to Chicago.

Back to the hotel....

Tonight we would have dinner outdoors in a lively( i.e loud) restaurant just outside St Jakob's church.
It wasn't the relaxed garden setting of the Meistertrunk the evening before but the food was good, as always seems to be the case in Bavaria.

Next up- we say goodbye to the Burg Hotel and set off on a drive to Bayreuth, Franconia, to visit Richard Wagner's Festspielhaus...