Hambach Wine Festival

June 20th
We had a slow morning as we knew we needed plenty of sleep, hydration and an ample breakfast in preparation for the day's festivities, a German wine festival.

Hambach Castle

Irene and Brian had invited some more friends to accompany us so we all met at the train station and took off together.  We traveled to a small town called Hambach, a bit west of of Heidelberg that held an important event in Germany's history.  The castle is the location where democracy was first discussed in Germany and the town put on a festival to hide that fact that it was a political event.  The Germans have been celebrating this day ever since and we decided that we would like to join in and experience a little bit of history.

Schorles, and Yes that is .5L

The little town of Hambach was very pretty with buildings decorated with live grape vines for party goers to drink their wine under and every street looked up to the castle.  How the wine festival works is you simply just walk from one wine stand to the next, each providing good food and wine and consume to your hearts content.  We eventually settled in the town's center where there was live music with dancers in traditional dress and a larger crowd of people to mingle with.

The night ended up being a blast.  We got to eat lots of good food and drink lots of wine.  Since wine can be so intoxicating, in order to save us from ourselves we drank schorles which is about 2/3 wine and 1/3 carbonated water.  I don't really know if that helped or not.  As we continued down the rabbit hole led by the wine we made many friends with some of the local Germans which then led to more brats and more wine and schnapps (on the house of course), lots of laughter and unfortunately a loss of sense of time.  We missed out train ride back to Heidelberg, but we eventually made it back with a long taxi ride.  What a night!

Dancers