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Exploring a cottage holiday in Germany:

Hotels have their place, sure, but I'm attracted to local accommodation in cottages, cabins even villas instead. You get a kitchen that actually works, a garden you can sit in when the sun decides to show up and none of that awkwardness about coming back late and tiptoeing past reception. You can burn toast at midnight without worrying about setting off a hotel fire alarm, which is something I didn’t know I valued until I had it. Germany works perfectly for that kind of holiday. And the country is woven together with regions that feel so different from one another, that a short break never feels like you’re seeing the same place over again, with different views. For mountains looking like they have been copied from a storybook, Berchtesgaden in Bavaria is the place to go. You can rent an old farmhouse turned into something beautiful and modern, with glass balconies and underfloor heating as well, or go the other way and find a wooden cottage near the Königssee that probably hasn’t changed much since the 1970s. Both have their charms. The luxury places come with saunas you’re going to use every night and outdoor hot tubs that steam dramatically against the alpine backdrop. The budget options are simpler, if a little creakyness in the floorboards, but you wake up to cow bells and the smell of pine, or the threadbare carpets and a shower that takes three minutes to warm up, suits you they are here. Then you go north to the Black Forest and the mood changes. Here the villas are nestled in hills so densely wooded a witch would even have to offer you gingerbread. The food is hearty; Schwarzwälder Schinken, heavy loaves of bread, and that famous cherry gateau which looks nothing like the sad supermarket imitations you get at home. Once I lived in a stone cottage near Triberg with a wood burner and enough cast iron in its kitchen for a small army. It wasn’t expensive, but it was the kind of place where you did not even try to slow down. You read books you abandoned three years ago. You look at rain on the windows and don’t feel guilty. You make simple meals with local butter that tastes different from the stuff in your fridge for reasons nobody can explain and then there is the Moselle Valley if wine and river views are your speed. Towns like Cochem or Bernkastel-Kues are just so pretty, half-timbered houses clinging to steep vineyards. The self-catering facilities here are anything from high end villas that have pools on the river side to small apartments above wine cellars where fermentation tanks are rumbling through the walls. You can go to castles in the morning and do nothing on a terrace with a bottle of Riesling that cost less than a sandwich back home. The culture is relaxed, almost Mediterranean in pace, and not what you might expect from Germany. People sit outside long after the sun has gone and chat over empty glasses. If the sea calls for something different, the Baltic coast around Rügen or Usedom brings back a different flavour. The architecture is grand and slightly worn in that pretty seaside way and the local food is fish. Smoked herring, fresh rolls from bakeries that open at 6 am and restaurants where the menu is predicated totally on what boats came in that morning. Villas here are big, airy houses built in the 19th century, when this coast was a fashionable escape for Prussian aristocrats, and modern eco-friendly cottages that are hidden behind the dunes in case we’re on a budget. The light up there is different too, pale and clear, and the beaches stretch for miles and miles. What sticks with you, though, is not only the setting of the place on which you live but, more than anything else, the rhythm of your day. In remote locations, early mornings play out slowly. You make coffee in a pot that takes forever to boil and drink it outside in the mist that is falling off the meadow. There’s a kind of quiet that you don’t get at home, which is only interrupted by the woodpecker and tractor humming off a distance away. You think about nothing, and somehow that helps to clear your head better than any meditation app ever has. You watch clouds float across a valley and realize you haven’t checked your phone in a while. But part of the fun is knowing a busy town is only twenty minutes away when you need it. You can drive to Freiburg or Bamberg and park badly and spend a few hours wandering markets and eating sausages from stalls and watching the world go by. Then you return to your cottage in the evening and get back to the stillness and the stars and you feel like you have all of the best of both worlds in one trip. The contrast makes each side taste better. The people you meet add their own color. There is usually a landlord or neighbour who takes genuine pride in telling the tale of his heating system as a great engineering genius, and you smile and nod because the radiators are excellent. The old woman who brings you eggs from her hens and communicates entirely through gestures and encouraging noises. Then there is the quirky one and never fails. On one trip to the Harz Mountains I kept running into a local chap called Dieter who maintained the walking trails. He wore shorts in weather that threatened snow and carried a clipboard like it was a religious text. Every time he saw us he would give a ten-minute lecture on the exact population of the village in 1953, or the correct way to scare off wild boar with an umbrella opened suddenly from a crouch. He was totally serious, completely unhelpful and absolutely hilarious without a meanness behind it. We began planning our walks around his patrol route on day three to see what he would say next. Those encounters don’t happen in a hotel lobby. So when you’re thinking about a few days away, Germany with a villa or cottage as your base makes a strange sort of perfect sense. It’s not flashy. It doesn’t have to be. You have space, good food, landscapes that shift from forests to rivers to sea and the odd unforgettable character who’ll probably never know he made your trip. You return with wine you shouldn’t have purchased, bread crumbs in your car and a sort of genuine feeling that you actually breathed for a few days. That is more than any all-inclusive buffet.
Have a great vacation in Germany from the EUCottages travel team