We were excited about visiting the fairytale city of Hamlin (Hameln) but after circling the old town for a frustrating 2 hours and getting glimpses from a far we gave up. Even with a map we were unable to find the tourist information office. Unable to park except at a shopping mall a bit far from the center for us and confusing. Found one hotel across a higway that was available but just too expensive for our 25 day vacation in Europe budget. We drove off to a nearby but boring village and found a decent hotel.
Rinteln was very easy and very cute and easy to navigate. So much for our 2 days on the fairytale trail.
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This is why I always recommend taking the train. Look how much time you wasted in your car, time you could have spent seeing the town. You could have come on Trip Advisor before hand and searched for hotels or pensions and had a lovely time. Please look us up before your next trip.
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I can%26#39;t speak for Hamelin, never having been there, but most larger places in Germany have signs directing people driving to the city center, and also signs for parking lots, some even electronically displaying the number of empty parking places. Of course, the center of many German towns are for pedestrians only, so you can%26#39;t drive into them, and can only circle around them. You could also have contacted the tourist office and they would probably sent you a free map of the town (which may have parking places shown on it) and also hotel information, or just visit their website which should be at www.hameln.de , as most places%26#39; websites in Germany are usually in the form www.PLACENAME.de.
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I agree to a point, but not speaking German, I personnaly find trains and buses etc. even more intimadating than driving. There are no trains where I live so am unfamiliar with them and I prefer to be on my own schedule.
There is hardly any info on Hameln on tripadvisor, I did look. The tourist office is poorly marked and hard to find, that is a fact and I hope someone takes notice.
I am stating my experience and I prefaced it by saying unfriendly %26#39;by Car%26#39; There are very few parking spaces, we went to every P we saw.My advice is go some other way if you decide to go.
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According to the map on Hameln%26#39;s website, the tourist information is located on a main street corner which looks hard to miss if one circles the town for two hours...
hameln.de/_images/1226-tourismus-infocenter-…
This is the hotel list:
hameln.com/tourism/hotels/hotels/hotels.htm
By the way, most of our cities and towns are not %26#39;car friendly%26#39; on purpose. There are more than enough cars around and people shall be encouraged to use public transport.
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One more point, it never hurts to ask someone for advice (although some drivers resist doing this under any circumstances- I learned a long time ago to just ask, it certainly simplifies things). Even if you don%26#39;t speak German, many people speak English, and can give advice whether for possible parking places, the location of the tourist information office, or other things.
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I would think the majority of tourists coming to Germany would not speak German, nor have many of them ridden trains before, but they all seem to do just fine.
Wanting to be on your own schedule (driving a car instead of riding a train) gave you a frustrating 2 hour ride around the city, a night in a town that you did not really want to stay in and a sour feeling about a lovely town.
Not doing your homework before travelling is not a very good reason to %26quot;dis%26quot; a town or city. Truly, it is not hard to plan trips through Germany using efficient public transportation. It also is not hard to find someone that speaks English, even if it is just a little bit when you are lost over here.
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Wow a little defensive aren,t you all? I did not DIS Hameln,I said it was difficult by car!I think this might be good for other travelers to know. Yes, the tourist info is on a corner and I HAD A MAP and did ask the way and was pointed in the right direction of where it was and it was still very difficult to find by car (remember I couldn,t park and go on foot.) It involved some sort of a stange left and circle around either a bridge or something (looked like a wall on the map)that was HARD to navigate.
This forum is supposed to be informative and I wish to inform other drivers of the difficulties I encountered. whichever expert, (who had never been there) looked on a map and said I did not do my homework, because it was obvious on a street corner was .I did plenty of homework and that comment was really unnecessary. Many of the websites for the fairytale road and the individual towns are broken or entirely in German and/ I was unable to print from the pages. I have at least an inch of info I printed from the web.
I know it is off season but this area, the fairytale road appears to visited mostly by continentals. We did not run into even one English speaking tourist on our travels in this area and the only other language I heard was French, once (except for middle eastern languages from the wait staff in the restaurants and hotels.The area seemed unused to English speakers but not unfriendly.
I loved Rinteln, which was recommended by someone on this forum when I asked where to go a few weeks ago. I loved Brukeburg palace also, and Bremen and Oldenburg. I most likely would have loved Hameln. The trip was certainly not wasted and we saw lovely places. Calm down folks no disrespect was meant.
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It%26#39;s not nice to have unexpected bad things happen to you on a vacation. Years ago, our family visited Neuschwanstein Palace driving from Munich early in the morning. Just before the palace, we got into a 3 hour traffic jam, the cause of which we didn%26#39;t know. It turned out to be for parking. After we parked, the family members kept dropping out on the way up the hill to Neuschwanstein. This was in the days before tour reservations of the interior. When I arrived, there was a line many hundreds of meters long and 4-6 people abreast. I just turned around and walked down, found the rest of the family, and left for Austria. My worst day as a tourist ever! This, coupled with several bad experiences in Munich soured me so much on Germany that I vowed that I would never return!!!
Much later, after meeting and marrying my German wife, I have now lived happily in Germany for five years, and never had such bad experiences again, revisiting Neuschwanstein several times too. Don%26#39;t let such experiences sour you, they can happen anywhere in the world. It%26#39;s nice for people to be aware of what can happen at the worst, and then they can be somewhat prepared for them. Now, I cannot recommend people in the height of the tourist season visiting the highlights of the Romantic Road, just as you cannot recommend driving in Hameln.
However, it does show that people have to be a little more prepared than they thought they were when visiting some places, and that there may be solutions to the problems (if we visit Hameln by car now, we%26#39;ll take a copy of the map on their website showing the parking lots). And it always doesn%26#39;t hurt to ask people for directions (which you did), I%26#39;ve learned from others in Stuttgart after they have walked out of their way to make sure I found someplace, now I do it myself for others. In general, I%26#39;ve found many people willing to go out of their way for a foreign visitor in Germany, opening closed museums, and also arranging a special private tour when one of the family had difficulties with the regular tour of a palace.
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