I was traveling with my two college aged children, and thought that a night in a castle would be a…read morefun experience on our road trip. We didn't have trouble finding the hotel, but when we arrived, about 8pm, and walked in the front door, there was no one there. We walked around for a bit, saw the restaurant, but didn't see any way to check in. Finally someone from the restaurant came up to the hostess stand area and we asked and they were like, "oh, I can do that for you". So we are checked in, and they want to walk us to our room first, which seems fine, so off we go up stairs, down halls, up more stairs, down more halls till we arrive at our room. Our room was very large, with a raised, timbered ceiling with a huge chandelier in the middle. Beautiful wood floors, and large windows that open on two walls opposite from each other (which helped with a breeze during the night), and a nice sized bathroom that was a few steps up from the bedroom floor. We were very impressed to say the least. Then we decide to go park our car and bring up the suitcases. Well, to begin with, the car park is well down a hill and quite far from the front door (and the driveway is gravel so rolling wheels don't really help), so absolutely bring up your luggage before you park the car. The car park is sizeable enough that there is no issue with parking, it is just a long walk if you were carrying your bags. So we drove them back up and dropped them off on the circle before taking the car back down. Now, to get the bags to our room - first, a large flight of steps into the main level of the castle. Then a second large flight of wooden steps, down a hall, a small set of wooden steps, then some stone steps, then two longer, narrow hallways before it opened up to a larger hallway and our door. So if you have mobility or back issues or problems with carrying things, this may not be the place for you! Once in our rooms we realized that we didn't have the wifi codes, and had to go back down to the restaurant to get them, then back up again. The wifi worked fine for us, so that wasn't an issue.
My daughter chose to take a shower before bed, and when you go in the bathroom the exhaust fan turns on. Not horribly loud, but loud enough that even with the door to the bathroom closed we could hear it going, and going, and going. We even got up a few times to make sure that we didn't do something to leave it on by accident. It finally turned off sometime in the middle of the night, but that was kind of a weird thing.
As I said, the leaded windows in the room open up and we had very scenic views of the property. There are areas on the property between the castle and the car park that have decayed, but made for scenic backdrops for photos. The next morning we went out and took lots of photos. There was a stone tower with ivy growing up the side, a large "railing" made from cement/stone with big newel posts, even a stone arch with a wrought iron gate which made for great family pictures - so bring a tripod or a friend to snap them for you! We decided we didn't want to spend the money on breakfast there, so we packed up and headed out early to find a local bakery (recommend Kerling's Feinbackerei in Coburg!) All in all, it was a nice stay, and certainly different from a typical hotel. It was a nice little change on our trip.
