What are some places that you had never intended to visit, but were pleasantly surprised when you did?

My mother is from Osnabrück and so I’ve been to Germany well over a dozen times in my life, it’s a beautiful country but the northwest has never been particularly thrilling for me. Hamburg and Bremen are nice but they’re far from the most interesting or beautiful port cities, those would be Wismar and Stralsund, but otherwise that part of the country is filled with places like the Ruhrgebiet which is simply unpleasant or cities like Hannover, Bielefeld, Münster, Wolfsburg etc which are probably very nice places to live but unremarkable destinations to visit. I maintain that the south and the east of Germany have the best places to visit and spend time.

However, in February of 2020 I had to go to Detmold because my mother’s cousin’s son was getting married, and since their family came all the way to the United States for my sister’s wedding it would be wrong if we didn’t do the same. I did not expect much from the city, I thought that it would be another very industrial, working class place with lots of Turkish people (I think that I conflated it with Duisburg in my mind) but I was pleasantly surprised. The town is really nice, with an amazing castle, das fürstliches Residenzschloß, the Falkenburg ruins, the Hermannsdenkmal which is an amazingly beautiful sculpture and a great monument of German history and a living history museum. When I go back to Germany, I’m definitely going to return to the city to spend some more time there.

Unfortunately I haven’t traveled much in the US and Canada, and every unplanned stop I have made on my travels on this content (ie when stopping for the night while driving from NYC to Florida and back) has been unremarkable. I wish I could say that Hamer, South Carolina was a hidden gem, but it was just the sort of place where I had to walk my mother into the rest stop and stand outside of the bathroom because gross guys were hanging out there in the middle of the night, making obscene gestures at random ladies.

Submitted March 26, 2022 at 10:14AM by tribvnvs_plebis https://ift.tt/4UQVtrh