Schweinfurt and Wurzburg

To get from Frankfurt to Schweinfurt you must endure a 2 hour car ride on the autobahn with a man who has a minimal personality who is against wearing deoderant in all forms. Hannah helped us arrange a car ride from Frankfurt to Schweinfurt via a website for ride shares (www.mitfahrgelegenheit.de)which is a very common way for the German people to travel. The website is difficult to navigate if you don't speak German but luckily our translator (aka Hannah) walked us through it and called our ride for confirmation of the pick up point and the cost. To our delight, the ride cost only 16€, which is great in comparison to the train (80€). We held our breath, endured the ride and were dropped of at Burger King for pickup by our first workaway host and enjoyed a little American fast food flashback while we waited.

Our workaway is with an English family who live in the village of Hirschfeld in Bavaria, Germany. The village only has a bar and a church but luckily, a bus that runs often. Emma, Aaron, and their 4 boys Cameron, Arlie, Jonah, and Darwin (ages 2-12) graciously invited us into their home. We are helping out with the kids in addition to chopping wood for the winter months (made easy via a chainsaw and hydraulic splitter), and doing some small home renovation tasks. We have a lot of freetime to explore the area and have been using it to its full potential.

On our first day Emma dropped us off in Schweinfurt where we took some time to explore the city and attend the local art Museum (Museum Georg Schäfer, featuring an exhibit about the relationship between animals and humans). There wasn't much to Schweinfurt but we made a day of it none the less. Emma told us that Schweinfurt is a depressed city from being smushed in between Wurzburg and Bamberg which are both very beautiful.




Oh look, another church.

We took a day trip to Wurzburg (Got a ride to Schweinfurt from the friendly American Keana down the street and hopped a train to our final destination). There are many Americans in this area becuase there is an Army base nearby.


The bus unfortunately only runs every 2 hours on Saturday :(.


Trainride through the countryside. You can see the local nuclear plant off in the distance.

We had a limited amount of time in Wurzburg because the last bus back from Schweinfurt left at 8:30 so we assigned our site seeing priorities and marched off to Fortress Marienberg.


Another church (Marienkapelle) along the path between the bus stop and the Fortress.

The churches are beautiful, most of them taking 100 years or so to build.

View of Grafeneckart and Dom St. Kilian in old town.

We had to cross the 15 century bridge Alte Mainbrücke to get to the Fortress. The bridge was full of musicians and people enjoying the locally made weisswein (white wein).

Aww.



We are probably going to hell for this.

The view from below would be enough to keep me away from the fortress. We hiked all the way up the hillside, marching on switchbacks through rows of wine grapes in 85 degree heat (of course the weather earlier in the week was very cool and only changed from cold to hot when we planned on doing this walk).







The fortress was enormous and we walked through the museum (Fürstenbaumus), but unfortunately a lot of the artifacts were destroyed during WW2 bombings, which were never mentioned in the musuem (all of the signs simply read "destroyed by fire in 1945").







The views from the top were pretty amazing.





Doing what the locals do best, sitting and drinking beer and wine. Locally made wine for Amy and locally brewed beer for Kurtis!

We finished are drinks and caught the train and bus back to Hirschfeld, collapsing from exhaustion upon arrival.