Rothenburg, Germany, (tourist information)  on the Tauber River and on the Romantic Road, is a walled Bavarian medieval city a short 44 mile drive southeast of Wurzburg.  The wall, which you can walk on, and the medieval architecture have been  tourist attractions for years. 

 

It is especially attractive to people like us who travel in recreational vehicles.  There is an area in which you can stay overnight just across the road from the entrance gate.  It is really not much more than a large parking lot divided into two areas, one where you can plug into electricity, and one where you cannot.  Ordinarily you purchase a ticket from an automatic dispenser to park there.  But when we arrived we were told by our next door neighbor that the dispenser was "kaput"--out of order.  So we parked overnight for free.  Our area in the parking lot did not have electricity, so we did without, using the battery for lights.  Where there is electricity, you pay for it by inserting coins. The sanitary block is pretty primitive, but it is clean.

 

We arrived in the late afternoon, got settled and then walked across the road to walk the town, which was very pretty.  If you have ever seen Walt Disney's Penocchio, this town could have been the model on which Disney artists based drawings of Penocchio's town.  Like every other German city we have visited, Rothenburg also was bombed and heavily damaged.  But an official in the US Secretary of War Office, aware of the towns's history ordered American Forces taking the town not to use artillary.  And the German military officer in charge of defences disobeyed Hitler's orders to fight to the death and surrendered.  So a lot of the town was spared.  Reconstruction started soon after the war ended.  We did not notice any war damage at all.

 

There are some museums in Rothenburg, but the whole town itself serves well in that role.  One of the sights that we apparently missed, probably because we stopped walking and turned around before we got to it, is the town hall.  But there is a photo of this fine old-fashioned structure in the Wikipedia link.