Fairy Tale Travel Article in Wall Street Journal

Today in the Wall Street Journal we are given a great article: On Germany's Fairy-Tale Trail by Rhea Wessel.  I occasionally share travel articles like these and this is a particularly strong one.

Some 60 cities are pinned to the Fairy Tale Route, a loose affiliation of villages and cities that claim a connection to a Grimm story or to the brothers.

We decided to focus on the trail within 100 kilometers of Frankfurt during a weekend trip in early June. With my husband and our 5-year-old daughter in tow, our tour began in Hanau, where the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were born in 1785 and 1786, respectively.

The city is home to a wide variety of fairy-tale productions during the Brothers Grimm Festival, the second-largest theater festival in the state of Hesse, which takes place each summer and draws some 75,000 attendees annually. This year, the festival features 90 plays, plus readings and speeches from historians about the lives and work of the Brothers Grimm. Children can choose from a variety of productions such as musicals, ballet renditions of Hansel and Gretel and a sing-along rock concert.

There's much more, of course, so click through to read it all. There are also some guides on places to stay and visit. Overall, a more detailed and helpful article than I usually find about the Fairy Tale Trail.

This is at the top of my dream vacation list these days.  Someday when the economy cooperates again, I will go on this journey...However, my parents are headed on a Baltic cruise next week and have been instructed to seek out anything fairy tale and share it with us.  They start out in Copenhagen, but since The Little Mermaid is currently in China, we won't be getting any pictures of her.