A few weeks ago, I spent a weekend in Tuebingen, Germany, with my sister visiting a friend who is currently living there. By Saturday evening, we’d seen most of the sights in town, and while spending a Sunday afternoon sitting on the river banks watching tipsy Germans go punting and get sunburnt sounded like a pleasant option, we decided since we’d already done that Friday we should find something else to do, maybe get out of town.

Some googling and vague memories of the suggestions in a guidebook lead us to decide on Lichtenstein Castle (Schloss Lichtenstien), because even as someone who normally says “ugh, castles”, I had to admit this looked pretty nice:

But… how to get there? The internet is surprisingly unhelpful on this point, with most information about the castle describing the conveniently-located car park, and a few ominous mentions of 90-minute uphill treks. The good news is, 90 minutes is a massive over-estimate and the castle is really not that hard to get to (though it would still be much easier with a car and there is some uphill walking involved). Here’s what we did, based on searching google maps and rome2rio, neither of which were totally accurate but by their powers combined…

1. Get to Reutlingen, which is easy to do by train. If you miss your bus connection (we did), it’s not a terrible place to wander around for an hour but it’s not exactly thrilling either, especially on a Sunday at lunch time.
2. Get a bus to Honau. We caught the no. 400, it leaves ~hourly (at least on Sundays, maybe it’s more frequent during the week?) from the bus stands which are to your left as you leave the station – basically, there’s a carpark near the taxi rank with some bus stops in it. You might want to ask the driver to let you know when you get to Honau. Bahn.de has bus info.
3. At Honau, you get off the bus pretty much at the bottom of the trail to the castle – it starts on the side street just behind you. Follow the signs, through the field next to the hedge and then into the woods. The trail in the woods is very clear, not especially steep, and in the shade the whole way up. To give you an idea, I walked it in crocs (don’t judge me). It took us around 45 minutes to get to the top and we’re not especially fit, although we are young and without knee problems etc.
4. The bus back to Reutlingen leaves from a stop just down the road from where you get off the bus. You’ll probably want to know the timetable so you don’t hike down the hill and then have to wait an hour for a bus.

Photo credit: “Schloss Lichtenstein 04-2010” by -donald- – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.