The Augustusburg Palace was beautiful, and the inside was available to view with a tour. There’s nothing in the way of original furniture because it all had to be sold to pay for the many palaces (20!) that Clemens Augustus built.But with the internal glory needs none. Speaking of the internals – no photos were allowed so I took photos of some of the beautiful pages in the picture book that was available for sale (but much too heavy for me):
From here we walked through the palace’s UNESCO listed gardens to the little hunting castle, 2 1/2 km away. This one was called Falkenlust (joy of falconry):
We’d hoped to catch a bus back to the train station, but there is no public transport anywhere near there, so we had to walk back. Sore feet and all. We hopped on the train and were off to Bonn a few minutes later.
We stopped for lunch at “Im Stiefel” (in the boot) pub. This was quite nicely done in a really old-fashioned style:
Next stop was the Beethoven House (where he was born). This wasn’t really that interesting – though it might be more fascinating if you could read and play music. We spent a while in there anyway and eaves-dropped on a tour that was going on. The house wasn’t really very big, but then Beethoven’s family wasn’t super-rich:
We headed to the Old City Hall and square. Unfortunately, Old City Hall was being renovated and thus hidden behind a cloth facade:
From here we went in search of some more palaces. These are being used by various faculties of the university in Bonn. It’s nice that these buildings are being used and maintained, but sad we couldn’t get in for a good look around:
After this first palace, we stopped for some coffee across from the pretty cathedral:
It has a lovely cloister as well:
And saw more pretty buildings:
We headed in the direction of the Poppelsdorfer Palace (also a university building), which is about 1km across a park from the first palace we saw earlier. There’s gorgeous villas and houses lining the streets on both sides of the interconnecting park.
As well as this, there’s an ‘open library shelf’. This is a cupboard containing a few shelves with books that you can borrow or take home and replace with something else if you like. Brilliant idea, I thought. There were a few people hanging around looking at books, so it obviously gets used:
Poppelsdorfer Palace:
There are beautiful gardens at the back of the uni. These are open to the public for free during the week, but they charge admission on the weekend:
And more pretty buildings on the way to the bus stop:
