Castle Road: Medieval Germany

This leg will take you around the edge of the Odenwald forest through the heavily populated Rhine-Main Valley.

 The stretch from Heidelberg to Heilbronn is the most scenic section of the Neckar Valley and an important wine-producing region. If you have time you should take the "Castle Road" (Burgenstraße), a route dotted with charming villages, vineyards and medieval castles.

The route leads past Nuremberg, the 2nd largest city in Bavaria and the cultural centre of northern Bavaria. The settlement grew up around the castle, which played a major role in the administration of the Holy Roman Empire: The assembly that governed the empire, called the Imperial Diet, was held there every year.

Near Hof you will leave Bavaria and cross the now invisible border into the former East Germany. Travelling northeast through Saxony you will pass along a low mountain range called the Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains), which forms the border between Germany and the Czech Republic. The city of Chemnitz was named "Karl-Marx-Stadt" from 1953 to German reunification in 1990.

Along the way through Thuringia you will pass Weimar, the centre of German classicism. After such luminaries as Martin Luther, Lukas Cranach and Johann Sebastian Bach had lived and worked in the city, Goethe, Herder and Schiller took up residence there towards the end of the 18th century. The composer Franz Liszt joined the list of prominent residents in the 19th century - a list that also includes Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner.

The route leads across the width of Hesse. With its brooding castles and red-roofed villages, the region was once the stomping grounds of the Grimm Brothers and the source of many of their famous fairy tales.