Fairy Tale Road
 

I have read many of the posts regarding the Fairy Tale Road and it sounds very quaint with small villages with half timbered houses. Here is my situation. We will travel to Germany late November and early Dec. with our 30 year old daughter. We will only have a little over two weeks with her and we will have an additional 4 days for ourselves. My origianal plan was to lay over in London beforehand and revisit some of those sites since it has been 13 years since we have been there but then I thought maybe instead we should add the time to Germany and do the Fairy Tale Rd. While my daughter is with us we will do the Romantic Rd. and I am thinking that sounds pretty similiar to the Fairy Tale Rd. How are the Fairy Tale Road and Bavarian area (Romantic Rd) the same or different. Thanks for your input.

The theme routes are tourism-marketing gimmicks. There's also the Castle Road, and the Half-timbered House Road:

http://www.burgenstrasse.de/showpage...iteID=1&lang=2
http://www.deutsche-fachwerkstrasse.de/uk/index.php

There's even a beer road:
http://www.bierstrasse.de/

Of these routes, the Romantic Road is the best known to international tourists and the busiest. Rothenburg and Füssen are the biggest tourist meccas. It isn't more romantic than the other roads or necessarily better. I would say that the other routes do a good job of living up to their names, while the RR is a more diverse collection of places. But its notariety has made it somewhat less authentically German than the other routes. English approaches lingua franca status in Rothenburg nowadays.

There are dozens of fantastic little German towns all around the country that didn't see any WW II bombs and have been nicely preserved. Many are on these theme routes; others weren't properly snapped up by the tourism offices into their theme road options.

If I were you, I would look at ALL the routes above and pick out whatever towns and places seem most interesting to you - then design your own route rather than following a route.

Hannoversch Münden is an eye-popping town on the Fairy-tale Road AND the Half-timbered Road. I'd want to see it for sure if you're near there. I know - for every tourist that knows about HM, there are 1,000 that have heard of Rothenburg. But visiting HM means you won't be shoulder-to-shoulder with international tourists.

http://www.hann.muenden-tourismus.de...GB-kpl_neu.pdf

I would recommend Bamberg on the Castle Road as well. Don't know why the Romantic Road folks didn't want to scoop up Bamberg.

I wish we could just wing it and make reservations as we go but I don't think that s possible any more.

You won't need reservations that time of year along the Fairy Tale Road.
Opposite to the Romantic Road, the FTR goes thru very nice and diverse landscapes, mostly hill country and river valleys.
The northernmost section between Minden and Bremen is less scenic as it's all just flat terrain.
From London, you can either go to Hanover or Frankfurt to drive the most scenic part which is Hameln/Hamelin to Marburg or Hanau.
If you go late in very late Nov/early Dec you will find Christmas Markets in all those quaint towns already open.
But the days will be short already and weather not always good..

I didn't go on the Fairy Tale Road, but other places I was in Germany last Dec. , I saw several vacancy signs.

Good information. I do think we will do a variation of the Romantic Road. Now my dilema is whether to do the Fairy Tale Rd. as well or spend that time in London instead.