3 Best Sights in The Fairy-Tale Road, Germany

Occupying both the house where the Brothers Grimm lived for much of their childhoods as well as the house's old barn, the Brüder Grimm Haus and Museum Steinau are fun and engaging museums. Featuring a reconstruction of the family's old kitchen, the brothers' former house also displays old personal possessions such as letters and reading glasses, and has an upper floor divided into nine rooms with interactive displays that celebrate the Grimms' stories and other fairy tales from around Europe. Across a small courtyard, the town's museum documents what life was like on the old trade route that ran through Steinau, incorporating into its exhibits a coach, inn signs, milestones, and the type of pistol travelers used to defend themselves from bandits.

Housed in an old, renovated farm building right next to the imposing family home in which Baron von Münchhausen grew up (it's now the Rathaus), the Münchhausen Museum is crammed with mementos of his adventurous life, including his cannonball. A fountain in front of the house represents another story. The baron, it seems, was puzzled when his horse kept drinking insatiably at a trough. Investigating, he discovered that the horse had been cut in two by a closing castle gate and that the water ran out as fast as the horse drank. The water in the fountain, of course, flows from the rear half of a horse.