Started the day off at Wurzburg's Residenz, or should I say the former prince-bishop's residence? Anyway, I didn't understand the whole prince-bishop concept, so I wasn't really expecting much in terms of his house. C'mon, we'd been visiting castles and palaces this whole trip. Well, when we go into the building (covered by Bavarian castles pass, thank you very much), I had to eat my words a little. I guess a prince-bishop lived more like a prince than a bishop. The man had a gigantic palace 'home'. The parking lot is a large cobblestone space, and inside the front doors stands a cobblestones courtyard. This courtyard was for the horse drawn carriages to enter in from the right hand side, circle around, and drop people off in front of the large staircase on the left hand side. The staircase served as a catwalk of sorts where people could admire your clothes and your walk. The staircase is reportedly he largest in Europe, and this is due to the domed ceiling over the stairs, which is one whole piece without supports. The ceiling has a mural showing the 4 known continents at the time: Americas (depicted as savages), Africa, Asia, and Europe (looking very cultured and refined). Much of the works in the various rooms followed the same theme of the 4 conitinents. Each room was quite opulently decorated with heavy Rococo style, and a lot of use of trompe d'oeil - trickery of the eye.
After he 40 minute tour we joined (with the Chinese/Japanese tour group), we walked through the rest of the rooms ourselves and then went to take a look at the gardens. Outside, were many beautiful wildflowers and well manicured shrubs. On our way back down to the house, the wind picked up and we started to hear thunder. Lighting appeared and the sky turned black! We rushed back to the car to grab our rain jackets before continuing on.
We wanted to visit the church that we saw the night before, as well as try and find some of that yummy 'Juisspittal' schreube wine from last night's dinner.
As it started raining, we stopped into a backerai for some lunch - we picked up a turkey sandwich and an open faced schnitzel sandwich. Mmm. We were going to take out, but we saw some strawberry cake and also some gelato too, so we decided to eat in and h ave the gelato to go.
It started pouring just as we made it to the church, so we took shelter fromthe rain while looking around. It was completely dark inside, and we couldn't figure out whether it was b/c there was no natural light coming in , or if the lights were off b/c they were doing renovations.
The rain seemed to slow down, so confidently armed with our Taigas, we set out in search of some Kupsch supermarkets for that wine. We lucked out on our third Kupsch visit, picked up a schreube and another Juisspittal wine in the traditional bottle as a souvenir. Then we got back to the car to drive to the Festung - the fortress.
By this time, the rainhad stopped, and he sun was out again. The fortress museums are closed on Mondays, but the actual fortress wasn't, so we paid the €3 for parking and went in to check it out. This Festung is the best place to view the city, and we got to take some marvelous pictures and panoramas without a lot of people around. After walking around the old prince-bishops' home, we left for Frankfurt.