Holidays in Bad Pumpernickel

New Year's Eve was strange this year. Usually, I love to spend that day with my friends, but as I grow older this is increasingly difficult. Most of my friends have children now, so they like to celebrate the new year with them. I, however, am not that fond of this type of event. Therefore, my partner and I decided to go away for the holiday, somewhere quiet and peaceful where we can stuff ourselves with great food and maybe use a Spa.
Thus we went to Bad Pumpernickel (as I like to call it in reference to W.M. Thackerey's fictional German Spa town in Vanity Fair) aka Bad Brückenau.
We had great food and went for lots of walks in the snow and most of the time just marvelled at the beautiful yet somewhat fairytale-like area. The spa resort of Bad Brückenau is about three kilometres away from the town, so it's like an island where only tourists and hotel staff live. It was built by Ludwig I in the first half of the 19th century and it would be the ideal setting for a Castle Falkenstein - LARP. (In a perfect world, where you get LARP-locations for free...) Sadly, we both have a rather annoying cold, so we didn't frequent the spa often, but we had lots of fun exploring the parks around the hotel.

 This is the main building of the hotel.

 Our room was at the "Fürstenhof", a seperate building about 200 metres away from the main hotel.

 This is the "Kurhaus", where the ball took place. The statue in fron of it is Lola Montez Ludwig I.

 The protestant church, a wonderful building with beautiful Jugendstil ornaments.

This oak tree is thought to be about a 1000 years old.

My partner and me are not the usual clientele of this place, but the staff was really friendly and helpful and we never felt out of place. We attended the ball at New Year's Eve only to devour the delicacies from the buffet and left soon after the dancing started and spent the rest of the evening walking through the beautiful park and watching the spectacular fireworks.
All in all, it was much fun and I would love to return there, but preferably not on New Year's Eve.