We rented a house in the small town of Braubach, Germany in March 2018. We had been there once before on a Viking cruise and noticed how centralized it was to visit sites in and around the Rhine and Rhineland Palatinate, the German State where Braubach is located. We found out that the town itself was really a neat little place. One of my regrets is we did not spend more time just looking at the town itself, although we did see a lot of it through daily activities. We took the train to Koblenz and Cologne from there and also walked to the grocery store several times.
We also went to a really neat bake shop and cafe in a small hotel. This is pictured above! We found a nice restaurant only a block from our house and walked there several times for dinner. And we walked through the edge of town to visit the major landmark in Braubach, the Marksburg, known somewhat redundantly as Marksburg Castle (a burg in Germany IS a castle).
This is the only picture of Braubach from our Viking trip in 2016. It shows the castle in the background. We were near the dock and about 50 feet from the Rhine in this picture. Our house in 2018 is not far from this spot and we later regretted not walking down here for a view of the Rhine. It was less than a five minute walk away. In fact, because the streets were so narrow, we had to park along the highway by the river and were half way to this spot every time we used the car.
The castle itself is only a fifteen minute walk, although we rode a bus up and back down on the Viking trip. We walked it from the house in 2018. Navigating the narrow road on the bus was much more thrilling than the quiet walk.
Below are some scenes from the walk.
The walk also went through the town for about a third of the total distance.
The streets in these pictures were typical of the whole town. Extremely narrow streets were the norm here. The half-timbered houses and shops made up most of the buildings. Our house had no garage, so we were forced to park the car in public parking along the Rhine.
Our first excursion from here was to the nearby castle itself. We simply had breakfast at the house and walked up the hill.
These pictures of the armory in the castle were from the 2015 trip as this room was no longer as accessible and you can now only see the arms from a platform overlooking the room.
A view of the Rhine from the castle and a picture of the castle tower from inside the castle.
We took several side trips from here to nearby sights. One of the best was a three for one day, in which we visited the town of Cochem, visited its small castle and then stopped by Berg Eltz on the way home.
We walked about a mile downhill, along a very steep cliff to reach Berg Eltz. It was not yet open for the year. It opens in early April and this was mid-March. We knew that we would not see the inside, but the trip was worth it anyway, as this is probably my favorite German castle.
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