It was less than an hour to Lübeck, a great little town, off most tourist maps and certainly not in many guidebooks. We decided to go to Lübeck because not many people do. It is north of Hamburg by about 45 minutes, a walled city built on an island in the river, which saves on the cost of a moat. There are about five or six main churches with really tall steeples or even double steeples, and then the Rathaus and town square, with many towers, AND the main gates to the city are towers. Rathaus means city hall, oh so appropriately named, and every town has one.
Towers: the amazing thing to me is that they are all brick. For example, Marienkirche (Mary's church) ishuge , with flying buttresses, tall, twin towers, a huge interior with arches, yet it is all brick, constructed about 1100. Just blows me away.
Another nice thing, most of the city survived the bombing in WW2 so you get a real old feel here overall. One unique thing is that in the city buildings, like the Rathaus, they have circle openings in the facade, where a lot of other places the openings are the usual window shape, or pointed arch shape, or the Moorish style clover shape.
With so many towers and turrets, the skyline is beautiful, around every corner it is a great view down the street to Jacobikirche or Petrikirche or Aegidienkirche or Whatever Kirche. I wish we had an extra day here.
We also have a nice room, right across from the cathedral for a reasonable price. The train station is about a ten - fifteen minute walk away from our hotel, but it is a nice way to come up and enter the city. The hotel is right next to the church; I mean the church just filled up our window view. Good thing we love the sound of the bells.
We had great food, including the best flamkuchen (kind of like a thin crust pizza) of the trip, good wine, and decent beer.
Most amazing of all: After all that rain, finally, "die sonne sheint und es ist warm!!!"
So we walked in the sun, down the main shopping street, "Die Hüxstrasse," out the main gate at the far end of town and across the river, then back past more churches including one with twin towers, that had a giant clock inside right next to the pulpit (Maybe to keep the sermons short? Or remind people how little time is left before they go to hell?). There were more stumbling blocks, a fountain, and a 3-D model of the city with braille directions.
We look back on great meals we have had this trip; in the husband-wife team in Baden-Baden, the late night wine drinking in Bacharach, the pork and beer at Pschorr in München... tonight in Lübeck was one to top them all. The restaurant is called VAI and the food, the wine, and the dessert (and I don't even like dessert) was just so beautifully presented that it hurt to even eat it. We ate lunch here, and like I said, the simple flamkuchen topped with mushrooms was a real treat. Tonight's dinner looked even more beautiful, but was oh so good when I finally dug in!
It is one of the rare times I have asked the waitress for her recommendations on the wine and food, and then just took her advice. Wow.
Then, the breakfast at our guesthouse had more variety of good food... It was hard to decide between smoked trout, salmon, prosciutto, six kinds of cheese, sun dried tomatoes, mozzarella cheese and basil on tomato, croissant rolls, cinnamon rolls, and on and on. Though it was tempting to just try it all, the trout won out. Lübeck is probably the single best town on our trip so far.