Rick Steves' Favorite Castle in Europe

We took a short, but packed, two-day trip to the Mosel Valley in Germany last weekend. Erin was the instigator of this trip after finding out that Rick Steves’ favorite castle in all of Europe is the Burg Eltz, located along the Mosel River and this German destination happens to be only 4 hours away from Amsterdam. For those of you who do not know, Rick Steves did a whole travel series for PBS, hosts travel tours, has written numerous travel books (none of which we actually own or have read), and is a European travel aficionado. He also has a website, which is where Erin found her information for the trip.

After seriously deciding this is a trip we need to take, we had to hurry and find a time to go before November, when the Burg Eltz closes. October turned out to be the perfect time for a Mosel Valley tour. The weather was mostly cloudy, but it never rained on us. The temperatures were pleasant: not too hot or freezing cold. The leaves were changing color, making the hills around the area look spectacular!

We rolled out of bed Saturday morning around 5:15 so as to make the most of our short two-day vacation. By 6:00 a.m. we were on the road…in the dark. And we drove in the dark for over two hours. We think it’s about time for daylight savings time to end. We don’t think it began to get light outside until about 8:30. Fortunately we had breakfast in the car and an audio version of John Grisham’s new book, The Innocent Man, to keep us awake.

We drove directly to Moselkern, a tiny town on the Mosel River. Rick Steves promised that from this town we could park our car and hike through the forest to Burg Eltz, about a 45 minute hike. We couldn’t exactly find the car park Rick Steves suggested, so we just found a spot on the side of the road and started walking. What a beautiful hike! We wound our way up to the top of the hills, following the Mosel River, until the Burg Eltz appeared out of nowhere. The forest was just a little bit misty, adding definite ambiance to our trek up to the medieval castle. The Burg Eltz has been intact for 700 years and the interior is furnished as if it was still the Middle Ages. The only way to get inside the castle is to take a 45-minute tour, in German of course, but for 50 cents we bought a handy English guide to read as we went along with our tour group. Lunch at the castle was better than expected, and of course the view was perfect! We enjoyed our short hike back to Moselkern and took off to find the next quaint town along the Mosel: Cochem.

We hiked up to the top of Cochem, got some good views of the town and the Mosel River, and got to experience a little bit of life in Cochem. Apparently Saturday is the day for everyone in the town to go out and sweep leaves off the street and sidewalks. There were also quite a few people visiting the cemetery to replace fresh flowers on the gravestones. Not much else was going on here. We found out there is more to the town further up the river. Cochem has a castle, a long park along the river, and lots of tourists in the busier area of town.

Our next stop was Beilstein, a town Rick Steves described as Cinderella-land. Beilstein is tiny. We walked around the entire town in about 15 minutes. There is a huge Catholic church and monastery in Beilstein, with only one resident monk! The castle of Beilstein is a ruin so we didn’t pay €2 apiece to go visit it up close. We did, however, walk around the castle, up to the top of the hill, and find a picturesque view up and down the Mosel River Valley. Beilstein used to rival Cochem as the most powerful town on the Mosel, but now its economy is totally based on wine and tourism. This is a very pretty town with great views of the Mosel Valley.

To get to Trier, where our hotel was, we had to drive an incredibly long way along the winding Mosel River. After an hour and a half, we wondered if we were ever going to reach the main highway, but we eventually did. It was only after we reached Trier that we got slightly lost for about 30 minutes. The Moscow circus was in town and traffic was a mess! It didn’t help that some important letters on our hotel’s sign were burned out and we missed our turn. Finally we found the hotel. By this time we were exhausted and decided to just grab something to eat at Burger King rather than find a restaurant and spend another 2 or 3 hours eating dinner. We crashed early.

Sunday was our day to sightsee in Trier before heading back to Amsterdam. Everything else in our weekend was icing on the cake after hiking to and visiting the Burg Eltz. Trier is another picturesque city, much bigger than any of the other cities we visited Saturday. Trier is the oldest city in Germany, founded in 15 BC by Augustus and boasting that it was inhabited even 1300 years prior to the arrival of the Romans! There are abundant Roman ruins – baths, towers, the Porta Nigra city gate, an amphitheater – to visit. The city cathedral is the oldest in Germany, begun in 326 by Constantine to celebrate his 20th year of reigning over the Roman Empire. The cathedral holds two relics, what is supposedly the “Holy Robe” of Christ and a “holy nail” thought to be from the crucifixion of Jesus. Trier is also the birthplace of Karl Marx, and though we walked by his house we did not have time or inclination to pay to enter the museum.

The drive back to Amsterdam was, thankfully, uneventful and absolutely beautiful! Perhaps we are so enthralled with fall foliage because neither of us has ever lived in a place that gets to experience the season of autumn. It was a fun, relaxing weekend for both of us. Oh, and The Innocent Man is a good book (so far – we only got about 75% through on our drive this weekend), though maybe not as thrilling as Grisham’s fiction books.