The Romantic Road

The Romantic Road is not some sort of a pilgrimage, like Camino De Santiago. It's just a collection of towns linked together for tourism purposes by German Tourism.

Some of the towns along the Road (like Landsberg, Nördlingen, Rothenburg, Bad Mergentheim, and Würzburg) are worthwhile destinations on their own merit, but the road itself is nothing special.

In 2007, just to prove wrong the "experts" who said you had to have a car to do the Romantic Road, I did it using only public transportation. There is a bus line, the Romantic Road Coach, that does it in less than a day, but they spend most of the time on the Road, and not much time in the towns. I did it the opposite way, often spending most of my time in one or two towns per day and only a few hours a day going between towns.

It's been a long time, but I've walked from Bad Windsheim to RodT. Didn't use a map, but pretty much followed the route: Illesheim, Bergbernheim, Nordendorf, Schweinsdorf, Rothenberg. It's fairly flat. The stretch from Illesheim to Bergbernheim is parallel to the main road, then you take a secondary road to Nordendorf. Then you pretty much have a straight shot into RodT. I wouldn't recommend walking the rails; the trains come fast and they are very hard to hear until way too close.

If you have Google maps on your phone you can use that.

You may want to contact the Volksmarch clubs in that area.

You can always walk along the bikeway

This link to hiking along Romantic Route can help. The corresponding German web page contain more information.

For translation you can use German tool DeepL which delivers better translations than oh-oh and does not track your behaviours.

The steam trains from Noerdlingen only run on a few dates per year, they aren't regular.