A beautiful Hanseatic city with a great deal of culture (Lubeck (Germany))

Member Name: kirlykird

Product:	Lubeck (Germany)
Date:	09/01/09 (26 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: History,clulture and good food

Disadvantages: none that we found apart from our trip being too short!

We initially visited the German city of Lubeck in July 2008. The plan to visit this city was a random decision which was tiny in comparison to the whole trip that we were about to undertake.
We had decided some months earlier that this summer we would be doing something different. This something would be part of a plan that took us away from airport lounges and flight delays and instead would see us packing up our people carrier with our tent and three children and making a mini Euro treck across to my husbands parents in his native homeland, Sweden.
The route was planned with military precision, taking into account countries passed, currencies required, pit stops, mileage, shortest routes, petrol consumption and many pin points in the map of where we would be staying over our three week trip.
We had decided to take the ferry across from Calais to France and get to Sweden, the start of our holiday as soon as possisble with as few stops as possible.

*Why Lubeck?*

When we decided to throw in an overnight stop as we figured that it was just too much to expect all of us to happily make it to Sweden in one day we looked at our precisional planning and decided to stop at around 4pm of day one. This happened to be around Hamburg. As my husband had previously visited this city we decided to try somewhere else close but that none of us had visited. We got out our map & out trusty friend google and began to google in the cities and towns in this area. The first city that we looked at was Lubeck and we were instantly won over by what we saw and read. We managed to find a nice looking Hanseatic hotel and got it booked promptly.

*The day of arrival*

We left Calais at around 8am on the day of travel and worked out that we should arrive in Lubeck at around 4pm. We seemed to have chosen to travel on what was to feel like one of the warmest days of the entire year and thanked our lucky stars for the air conditioning that bellowed through our car. We quickly passed through the small area of france, through Belgium, Netherlands and into Germany. The driving route was a very interesting and beautiful way to get to this destination.
This was to be my first visit to Germany and I was instantly impressed with the cleanliness and natural beauty of this country. If you decide to take a driving route to Lubeck, expect to be impressed with motorway & autobahn facilities. There are a lot of clean toilets, outside off road picnic and barbeque areas, an abundance of fuel filling stations and generally fast free flowing roads.

* Our arrival into Lubeck*

When we first arrived in Lubeck, the sumnwas shining and we were full of the holiday spirit. Aside from google photos, we did not really know what to expect from this city but from what we saw so far, we were very impressed. We drove through the city and to our hotel which was a beautiful 14th century Hanseatic hotel which is located on the river Trave.We checked in to the hotel (review to follow) , freshened ourselves up with well needed showers and off we went to hit Lubeck after all we wanted to make the most of this as we were only staying for one night.

*About Lubeck*

Situated at the Trave River, Lubeck is the largest German port on the Baltic Sea. The old part of the town is an island enclosed by the Trave. Due to its brick Gothic architectural heritage, it is on UNESCO's list of World Heritage Sites.
As taken from Wikipedia:

Buildings:
Town Hall.

Lightship Fehmarnbelt in front of the Concert and Congress Center.

Hospital of the Holy Spirit, one of the oldest social institutions of Lübeck (1260)

A typical crow-stepped gabled town house
Much of the old town has kept a medieval look with old buildings and narrow streets. The town once could only be entered by passing one of four town gates, of which two remain today, the well-known Holstentor (1478) and the Burgtor (1444).

The old town centre is dominated by seven church steeples. The oldest ones are the Lübecker Dom (the city's cathedral) and the Marienkirche (Saint Mary's), both from the 13th and 14th centuries.

Other sights include:

the Lübecker Rathaus (Town Hall).
Saint Catherine Church, Lübeck, a church that belonged to a former monastery, now the Katharineum, a Latin school.
Thomas Mann's house.
Günter Grass' house.
Church of St. Lawrence, located on the site of a cemetery of people dead during the 16th century plague.
Church of St. Jacob (Lübecker Jakobikirche, 1334).
the Salzspeicher, historic warehouses where salt delivered from Lüneburg awaited shipment to Baltic ports.

Museums
Lübeck has many smaller museums like the St. Annen Museum, the Behnhaus and the Holstentor. Lübeck Museum of Theatre Puppets is a privately run museum. Waterside attractions are a lightvessel that served Fehmarnbelt and Lisa von Lübeck, a reconstruction of a Hanseatic 15th century caravel.

We first headed up towards the shops where there is an eclectic mixture of modern shops and fast food take aways to more individual shops and more upmarket restaurants. We did not stop in Lubeck to shop, however, if we had, there would have been plenty of choice.
The town centre itself is full of gorgeous buildings and is full of history. We spent hours exploring the small side streets of Lubeck. The city is very charming and definately somewhere to go for old fashioned German style tourism combined with friendly people.

On the other side of the town, there were pavement cafes and restaurants, a very cosmopolitan feel within a city of history and culture. In the evening, we headed back down to the water side by our hotel and had our evening meal in one of the many al fresco river side restaurants. This was a very charming place to eat on a warm summers evening, watching the world go by, hearing the hustle and bustle of the city and watching the sunset with some good wine.

*Time to leave Lubeck*
The next morning after breakfast, we repacked the car and we were on our way by 8am. The city was quiet and the water was glistening and calm. We were very sad to leave Lubeck and knew that we would be back again.

We obviously continued up to Puttsgarden and across to Denmark and into Sweden and began our proper trip from there. When it was time to return, we came back into Germany, saw the sign for Lubeck and on a very impromptu decision decided to stay again! We managed to get a room in the same hotel and did our exploring all over again with the sun shining just as bright as our first visit and we soon fell in love with this city even more.
Will we return? Oh yes we will, after all it feels like the sun always shines in this beautiful city.

Summary: Well worth a visit for a typical piece of historical Germany