I was glad to return to Europe last June.  We are back home now and we feel very blessed to have visited and seen so many beautiful places for a month.  First country on our list was Germany.  My partner had complained that we had been to Germany a number of times and yet we have yet to see a great part of the country.  Thus, this year, we planned a visit to a number of German cities we had only heard of and seen on travel videos but we ourselves never explored. 

As soon as our UNITED flight touched down at Frankfurt International Airport, my partner, Marc, who had planned out the itinerary for most of our trip, and I made our way to the DB Train Ticket Office to purchase our 7 Day German Rail Pass.  It proved to be a very wise advise from travelers to Germany who had purchased the said pass before.  It helped us lower our train fares as we traveled throughout Germany as well as France.  If I recall correctly, we paid a total of 500 Euros for it.  It might sound a huge amount for some but buying tickets separately would have cost us a lot more.  That done, we caught the next train to Wurzburg which was to be our base as we traveled to Rothenburg, Nuremburg, and Heidelberg.

We left Frankfurt  at approximately 5 pm and we arrived in Wurzburg two hours later.  We saw our hotel, IBIS, from the train as it pulled into the train station.  It looked very far from the city center and it did feel very distant when we walked to it that afternoon. Anyway, saddled with heavy backpacks and one huge suitcase, we reached IBIS after an eternal 15 minutes.  Upon arrival, we were welcomed by a friendly, tall, lanky and young German hotel employee. We checked in, got our key and headed to our room on the first floor.  We freshened up quickly, and headed back to the city center to get dinner.

Since it was getting late and stores were closing for the day in Wurzburg, we ended up having our very first meal in Europe at guess where, McDonald's!!! It was there I realized I was really not in the US anymore since we had to pay for water.  In fact, for the tiny bottle I grabbed from a shelf, we paid a whopping 4 Euros for it! Anyway, Marc ordered the usual, a big burger, while I ordered the chicken wings.  I couldn't complain since we were at the train station and we didn't know anywhere else to go. 

That said, we truly had an adventure waiting for us not to mention COVID!