Romantic Road

The most scenic section of the Romantic Road is the southern end, with the view of Neuschwanstein, Fuessen and the Alps. The rest of the road, in my opinion, is no different from any other country road in that area of Bavaria, with the exception of the presence of more tourism related businesses.

Cochem to Rothenburg via Trier is pretty far out of your way. Unless you drive on secondary roads (which will take you a very long time, going all the way to Rothenburg), the view from the autobahn in this area is mostly forested hills with an occassional town. So far as I can recall, just about the most interesting sites along this route that you can see from the road are some modern windmill farms and the ruins of Burg Nanstein overlooking Landstuhl. It probably is one of the more sparsely populated regions of Germany.

Hi Aly,

We did a very similar route in Oct. 2007. Flew to Frankfurt, drove to Cochem, then on to Rothenburg and finally to the Berchtesgaden area (by Salzburg).

We have a "trip report" at:

www.fodors.com/community/europe/moselrothenburgbavaria-report-with-photos.cfm

From Rothenburg we drove via Ulm and Augsburg then around Munich towards Salzburg.

Paul

Hi Aly,

I agree with the poster who said that the southern part of the Romantic Road is the most scenic stretch.

Even though built upon Roman roads, the Romantic Road was actually built for tourism, especially Americans who were stationed in Germany after WWII, in an attempt to revive tourism after the Nazi horrors.
Hope this link provides you with some ideas and insights:
https://www.romantischestrasse.de/?lang=uk

Aly,
if you are going straight from Rothenburg to Salzburg, the easiest way is by Autobahn (A7) via Nürnberg (A6)and Munich. But you will NOT have to drive THROUGH Munich, you will be skirting it on the Autobahn bypass. Since Munich and Salzburg are fairly close, it is the simplest route.
Getting there on secondary routes would take a much longer time, I would save the scenic drives for when you are actually in Salzburg.
I can highly recommend ViaMichelin for your route planning in Europe, here the link:
http://www.viamichelin.co.uk/tpl/hme/MaHomePage.htm

I want to add that you should bring a good map with you, and plan out the route in advance. Rick's book says the route is well marked, but in actually driving it I found signs few and far between; plenty of times a small road came to a Y intersection with no sign indicating which way to go. The maps they give away are far too coarse to indicate more than the general direction of travel between towns which are connected by multiple roads (one of which presumably is the Romantic Road route).

One note about navigating roads in Germany (and most of Western Europe in general). Usually, it is easier to follow the names of towns than to look for route names or numbers.