Vickitty-Koeln! Vor vielen Jahren, hatte ich sehr gute Erfahrungen da! Gut, das freut mich, dass du mehr als eine Ort besuchen willst.

Get over to Alsace. German is spoken south-west of you, and there is a great castle or two between Obernai and Hohwald and a three-star one called Hoch-Königsburg down west of Selestat. Either of these trips could be managed by public transport in a day.

Or maybe you can find a bus tour from K.

Harzer

All right. If all works out well, I'll do the first of these little outings tomorrow (Monday), to go see this Kloster in Maulbronn. My local transportation website suggests taking the Strassenbahn to Bretten, and then taking the Bus to the stop "Maulbronn Altes Stadtbad". If you happen to know that this bus stop is a few miles away from the Kloster, please tell me now!

hi there,
sorry, have seen these posting too late so I guess You are on Your way to Maulbronn. Indeed it is a "must place" for all that are interested in history. Most of the other place that ware named here YOu cant reach in one or two hour by public transportation. Not Schw. Hall and of course not Duesseldorf or any place in Bavaria. Mainz is also not that near, but worth the way going (dont forget the Gutenberg museum). And Speyer is also worth, dont know whether You've been there. An other choise is Mannheim and do a stop an the way in Schwaetzingen to visit the castle and the garden. Beautiful.
have fun
Gar

Not too late to make suggestions until I'm back home! I did check the times according to Deutsche Bahn, and there's several that are a bit longer than I'm looking for, but Mainz is only an hour and a half and Bad Wimpfen is approximately two hours, so both doable. I must have overlooked how far Schwaebisch Hall was... about 3 hours. Ooh, and the Schloss at Schwetzingen looks very nice, and close. I may have to go see that.

Anyways! I went to see the Kloster Maulbronn today and it was quite enjoyable. I posted a mini-report so others researching could find it too:
http://www.fodors.com/forums/pgMessa...p;tid=34514669

Bleh to German bureaucracy. They're getting in the way of my travel plans! Running here and there, getting someone to sign this or that paper, dodging strange opening hours and keeping me busy far too late. After failing to make the hours of one office I needed to drop something off at, I did make a point to go for a bit of a destress break. Too late in the afternoon for any of the lovely suggestions here, though I nearly headed off to Schwetzingen, as it's the closest... but the Schloss closes at 4 pm. Barely enough time to get there at that point, let alone into the Schloss. So... I went to the nearby village of Ettlingen instead. (10 minutes by public transport) It was a pleasant little town, with a small museum in their Schloss (free), some nice churches, and cute little medieval streets. It wouldn't have kept me busy all day, but was a good place to relax and unwind.

wow. this really brings back memories. i think i've posted in response to one of your other questions awhile back. i studied in germany for a year and instead of one last trip, we did a pub crawl or Kneipenbummel (since you know german) through tuebingen. it was mostly other american exchange students i had made good friends with. we drank one beer, usually hefeweizen, at each pub. i think we went to 10 bars in total i think we made a lasting impression! we pre-selected our stops on the crawl and had t-shirts made with a map of our stops. it was the time of my life from what i remember but... that may not be your cup of tea.

to answer your question more directly what about schwabisch hall?

oops i should have read the entire thread and the original post date.

Don't worry about it, it hasn't been that long since it started. And thankya for the suggestion. A pub crawl isn't quite my style though... I did do one my first weekend in Germany with the program folks... and tried my first ever beer, and decided I didn't like it. The Bailey's hot chocolate was very good though... but not one to drink much and don't have much in the way of drinking buddies anyways. So travel, if I can work my schedule out yet!

Just reread this thread and realize that I typed MOSTAR instead of MOSBACH (freudian slip,Mostar is in Croatia where I am planning to go next year). Sorry to confuse you.

If you're going to Mannheim or Heidelberg you can easily combine Mosbach, it's worth it. Bahn.de shows you can go directly to Mosbach bus station in one hour and a half from Karlsruhe. Then you can stop in Mannheim on your return to Karlsruhe. Bad Wimpfen ,despite its history, is not as touristically developed (like an old east german town)as Mosbach I would steer you to Mosbach simply because it's more visually attractive than Bad Wimpfen. Hope you can find the time to do your one last outing!