I didn't do a lot of research in advance on where I would be venturing; in fact, this part of Germany is largely ignored in the American guidebooks. I knew I needed to start in Stuttgart, at the archives for the Kingdom of Wuerttemberg, but I didn't really want to stay in the city. Thanks to hotels.com, searching in the vicinity of Stuttgart, I ended up with a hotel in a village called Bad Urach. I imagined a peaceful farm village out in the middle of nowhere - that is how it looked on the map; instead I got a bustling resort town in the Schwabes Alb, a mountain range that is to the Alps like the Black Hills are to the Rockies. They even have hot springs and decades old thermal baths that gives Bad Urach very much the feel of South Dakota's town of Hot Springs.
A few differences, the most noticeable being the town square, MarketPlatz, which is surrounded by medevial half-timber houses. The town even has the ruins of a castle, up on the top of a hill above a waterfall. The traffic is much worse here as well, being only 40 km from the city of Stuttgart. Another difference is the history; medevial houses are only the beginning, there are Roman roads crossing the range, and artifacts found in the area dating back 35,000 years. The food is very good and typically German. I will enjoy!
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