Category Archives: Bregenz

Wednesday 27th June 2018 – WHAT A DREADFUL …

… night that was!

It was stifling hot in that bedroom so I had opened all of the windows. And not long after going to be I was joined by a moth and a mosquito. That put paid to any hope that I might have had about a decent night’s sleep.

No breakfast at the hotel either, so I had another shower and then my laptop decided to crash. It was clearly not going to be my day.

Having sorted myself out I took my stuff downstairs and handed in the key, to find the proprietor and her friend tucking into a hearty meal. “Kein frühstuck” indeed.

All in all, what with one thing and another, I wasn’t very impressed. But you can’t win a coconut every time and I’ve had some pretty good deals in the past.

police in streets koppigen switzerland june juin 2018Outside, all of the streets were full of policemen. I’m not sure why, unless they had heard that I was in the vicinity.

Apparently it is something to do with the roadworks and they are directing the traffic.

But all of Switzerland’s roads seem to be undergoing repair right now. It’s like one huge building site and there’s no end to it.

The road to Zurich was fairly rapid for a change and it didn’t take long for me to arrive there. But driving around it took me much longer than it might have done. It’s changed considerably over the last 30 years and the last time that I was here it was dark.

Another thing that they have a habit of doing is putting the main destinations on the “motorway” road signs and only the small villages on the ordinary road signs. And when you only have a small-scale atlas, it doesn’t help.

No point in asking The Lady Who Lives In The Satnav. She doesn’t recognise Swiss Motorways as being toll roads and doesn’t understand the concept of “avoid all motorways”.

Winterthur was easy to negotiate, although people there don’t understand the idea of roundabouts, and I had not one, not two but three close encounters at various times.

At St Gallen, I gave up. No idea of the village on the Swiss side of the border and “Bregenz” was only advertised by the motorway, so I bit the bullet and went that way.

I dodged off at the exit before the border, and luckily there were no police patrols checking for motorway toll stickers, and crossed into Austria at Lustenau.

Diesel was only €1:21 at Lustenau so I fuelled up Caliburn. I also fuelled up myself – Austrian bread is nothing like as good as German bread but a couple of bread rolls with my salad and that was me organised.

Through Feldkirch and onto the S16 eastwards, and I took a little diversion.

The Arlberg Pass has always been my preferred destination over the Alps but there’s another pass over the mountains between Partenen and Tschafein that I had never taken. So boldly going where the hand of man had never set foot, Caliburn and I set off.

silbertal austria june juin 2018But somewhere stuck up a blind allet is the little village of Silbertal.

Somewhere else that I had never visited before today, and it’s one of those villages that in a country that had 99 out of the 100 prettiest villages in the world, Silbertal is well in the Top 10.

Unfortunately parking was an issue here, as was time, so I didn’t have the opportunity for a good look around.

schruns tyrol austria june juin 2018At Schruns, where I was trying to find a place to stop to take a couple of photographs, I nearly squidged a pedestrian who couldn’t make up her mind whether to cross the street or not.

Having both dillied and dallied, we decided to advance at exactly the same moment.

But eventually I found a parking space and could whip out the Nikon and show you some of the beautiful South Tyrolean scenery.

fc schruns austria football june juin 2018I’d parked up on the car park of the local football club, FC Schruns, and seeing as the ground was open, I went for a wander inside to see what was happening.

Certainly an improvement on many French football grounds that I had visited, although when I saw the prices for a season ticket for the forthcoming season’s matches, I’m surprised that they weren’t playing at Wembley Stadium.

“Somewhat elevated” would have been an understatement.

tschagguns austria june juin 2018Over there, that’s not Schruns but those houses on the side of the hill are in the town of Tschagguns.

I’m not sure how the name of the town should be pronounced, and so I’ll leave you to pronounce that as you see fit.

All I can say is the name sounds very appropriate if you have to carry your heavy shopping up there. You can rule me out of that, no matter how idyllic the view might be.

ski jumping tschagguns austria june juin 2018Tschagguns has a very good claim to fame in the realm of Winter Sports, in that it’s a ski-jumping centre.

Not that you would, of course, expect me to be up there. For me, I’m all in favour of terra firma when it comes to skiing. The more firma, the less terra.

And even so, they can’t be much good up there because even Eddie the Eagle once beat an Austrian ski-jumper.

silvretta pass toll Mautstelle Partenen austria june juin 2018And now I realise why I’ve never come this way before.

Just up there shortly before the head of the Pass is a toll booth. And they expect me to pay €21:50 to pass the next 40 kilometres to Landeck.

Even having negotiated the price down to €15:00 that was still €15:00 more than I was ever intending to pay, so I turned round and retraced my steps.

Maybe it might cost me more in fuel, but it’s the principle of the thing.

arlberg pass st anton austria june juin 2018Now, this is much more like it. I’ve made my way all the way round and this is St Anton at the foot of the Arlberg Pass.

When you see the road up there, that’s been improved considerably since the late 1970s when we used to struggle up there with 47 passengers in lightweight Ford R1114 coaches in the good old days of Salopia.

Caliburn leaps up there of course, as you might expect and one of these days I’ll post a video of the climb.

lech austria june juin 2018Only one town in the whole wide world where Strawberry Moose and I would be right at home, and that’s the town of Lech.

The name is quite appropriate.

Nerina and I first came here on our honeymoon in 1988 in a beat-up old, rusting Ford Cortina estate OCC 883S (which, by the way, was younger than Caliburn is now, although you wouldn’t ever think so).

snow alps lech austria june juin 2018And we so liked the place that we vowed that one day we would come back.This is the second time that I’ve been here since then.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I came here in June 2014 in the snow, although this year, the snow is way up the mountain.

I do wonder sometimes if Nerina ever made it back. Knowing how things pan out, I’ll probably bump into her walking through the streets here tomorrow morning.

lech austria june juin 2018And in case you are thinking that I’m joking, it did once happen in Brussels like that in 1991. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

I went to the little guest house where I stayed before but that was closed up and deserted.

Several other places were fully booked but one hotel, although totally deserted like the Marie Celeste, had left its doors open and the internet switched on.

pension kilian lech austria june juin 2018Consequently an on-line booking agency quickly found me a room that was well within my price range only 390 metres from where I was standing, and the Lady WHo Lives In The Satnav did the rest.

So here I am. A nice comfy single room run by an Australian landlady (yes, Australian, not Austrian) but the plugs won’t fit my slow cooker so it’s a scratch tea tonight.

Apart from that, no complaints whatsoever and I’m going to be very comfy here.

I hope.

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Friday 15th May 2015 – I’M BACK ON THE ROAD …

… but I didn’t get too far. And when I sort myself out a little better, I’ll show you why.

But those of you who follow this rubbish on a regular basis will recall that I have been having kitchen and bathroom worktop issues. I mentioned this to Hans because Germany is the place to be if you want high-quality but affordable products, and so he had taken me on Wednesday evening to several furniture and DiY places.

So to cut a long story short, for which you will all be grateful, on my way out of eching I went and picked up 5 planks of 28mm light-oak, 60cms by 240cms. Cost? Just €375 – for the lot, not just for one. If that’s not going to do the job that I want, then nothing will.

donauwurth germany may 2015From here I went to a town called Donauwurth, situated on the banks of the River Danube at its confluence with another river, the name of which I have forgotten.

It’s yet another walled city, of which there is an enormous number in Germany, and if you look very hard, you’ll see a pedestrian gate down there at the end of the path. That’s the way in. We are actually looking at the old moat right now.

centre of donauwurth germany may 2015It’s quite a beautiful little town, calm, quiet and peaceful with some beautiful buildings that look quite old.

But don’t allow yourself to be misled by appearances because it isn’t all what it seems. These buildings may indeed look old but you will be hard-pressed to find anything in the centre dating from before 1945. That’s because despite it being calm, quiet and peaceful, it was selected for the target of the British Bomber Command in April 1945, when the war was all but over and when whatever there was that went on (or didn’t go on, whichever is the case) here had long-since ceased to be of any military significance.

entrance gate donauwurth germany may 2015Not that that had ever bothered anyone in Bomber Command. Lord Cherwell’s infamous “de-housing” report had made it quite clear that the German civilian population was to be the target of the bombers, and Bomber Command carried out these perverse attacks to the extreme degree, long after they had ceased to have any point (if they ever had any point in the first place).

As the American Strategic Bombing Survey, that visited Bombed-out Germany so succinctly put it in its report, all it did was to divert post-war Allied resources to repair the damage and to house and feed the destitute when these resources could have been better-used elsewhere.

plaque for sudeten germans donauwurth germany may 2015I’ve talked in a few previous posts about the problem of the Sudeten Germans, and this was something that took me quite by surprise.

I didn’t expect to see anything like this here a memorial plaque in honour of the Germans of the Sudetenland, and in particular the first batch of 12,000 who arived here in February 1946 and dumped out of the goods wagons in which they were travelling.

They were of course the lucky ones. Most of them arrrived much later, having undertaken the journey on foot, through the savage Central-European winter and having faced all kinds of horrors on the way, death being the least of them.

old city walls germany may 2015There are still some old structures remaining here in Donauwurth despite the devastation of 1945.

These are the old city walls and if my Latin is up to much after all of these years, the plaque tells me that they were built in 1091 and destroyed in 1818, with a few bits added on and knocked down in between.

low energy fridge media markt donauwurth germany may 2015Donauwurth hadn’t finished with me yet.

At the local branch of Media Markt was this nice under-the-counter fridge with small freezer compartment. What was interesting about this was not the price (a mere €199) but the energy consumption – just a claimed 89kW per annum.

If it really does all of that then it’s the most economical of its type that I have ever seen. 89000 watts is about 250 watts per day and I could run that quite happily all year without worrying. You’ve no idea just how much I was tempted.

June wasn’t at home so I pushed on to the Bodensee. My aim of spending a night in Austria came to naught as everywhere in Bregenz was either closed or full. Not only that, at one place I had a most unusual experience anyway, in that someone actually asked “what do you want?” when I rang the bell. Of course I couldn’t contain myself and relied “what do you think that people usually want when they call at a hotel?” and I was impressed that I could say that right off the cuff in German.

guest house lindau germany may 2015Lindau was full too and parking in the old town had passed beyond the expensive into the absurd. I headed out, looking for a quiet layby to lay my weary head when, having taken a wrong turn somewhere, I encountered a guest house, at just €38:00, miles from anywhere.

Primitive and very 1950s it might have been, but I wasn’t arguing at €38 for the night.

medieval buildings lindau germany may 2015I’ve been to Lindau a few times in the past, but it’s been a good few years since I’ve been here. The last time was on my honeymoon with Nerina back in 1988, and I was itching to return as it really is a beautiful city and I cared not a jot about the driving rain.

Very medieval as you can see, and a favourite spot of the Royal house of Bavaria who had a chalet nearby for the summer.

medieval houses lindau germany may 2015And in news that will startle just about everyone reading this, I had a Chinese takeaway for tea.

Its well-known that I don’t like Chinese food all that much but I didn’t have much choice here as the takeaway food outlets are not exactly thick on the ground here – I don’t suppose that Mad King Ludwig would have approved.

But €4.50 for a huge plate of tofu, vegetables and rice to eat in the comfort and privacy of my own bedroom is not to be sniffed at.

At least, something has gone right for me today.

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Friday 27th June 2014 – IT DIDN’T TAKE ME LONG, DID IT?

overnight parking place bodensee meersburg germanyThere I was this morning after another excellent night’s sleep in this comfy little spec at Meersburg (and I’ll stop here again, no problem), having breakfast of coffee and half a baguette smeared with strawberry jam, when I began to notice a regular stream of small ships sailing back and to across the lake.

That can only mean one thing – that there’s a ferry connection from somewhere over here to somewhere over there and so Yours Truly set out to investigate.

But did I say a good night’s sleep? I certainly did. And not only that I was on my travels again. I was watching some British World War I cavalry charge up this steep hill to attack a German post there and while they were all almost swept away and almost everyone was unhorsed, they carried the position whilst a few of their number tried to round up the loose horses. I remember saying to myself is that had the cavalry been followed up by a regiment of infantry they could have swept on right behind the lines and caused chaos.

Nothing new in this though – at the Battle of the Somme a detachment of infantry did succeed in breaking the lines in one place on the first day and had the cavalry, standing by in the vicinity, been sent in to exploit the breakthrough, they could have cleared up too. But that was a lost opportunity.

From there, Cecile and I went off to look at the animals at the shelter and an old black-and-white collie fell for me and so I took it home and we lived happily ever after. And there is nothing more unlikely than this, as you all know.

bodensee ferry meersburg konstanz germanyI found the ferry terminal, just a couple of kms down the road and €11:50 later, Strawberry Moose, Caliburn and I were sailing to Konstanz on the other side of the lake. Never a good idea, as you know, for me to find a ferry . After all, it makes me cross.

Getting to Knostanz was one thing – finding the correct border crossing into Switzerland (well, I am here!) was quite something else entirely and I actually crossed the frontier three times before I could find the correct road out of the town. A leisurely amble then took me along the southern shore of the Bodensee and eventually across into Austria at Bregenz.

Bregenz had the first (of many) traffic jams and so I didn’t get to see too much of the town but then a drive over the mountains, into southern Germany and a stop for lunch did the business.

On the way over the mountains between Austria and Germany, I encountered these two vehicles. Single-seater machines and equipped like proper little cars, with steering wheels and pedals. But judging by the wiring that I could see inside the vehicles, they may well be electric cars. However there was no-one around to ask.

Mind you, judging by the names of the vehicles – the red one being a City-El and the white one being a Mini-El-City, electricity is a good guess.

Onto the Autoroute after that, and wasn’t that a big mistake? Say what you like about Germans, when they organise something, they organise it in spades and the traffic jam on the autoroute was a belter. We must have sat for 2 hours without turning a wheel at one point. Stop-start all of the 113 kms to Munich and then fighting the rush hour traffic out of the city to Hans’ place.

So now I’m here, eventually, and after a decent meal and some live music in a pub nearby, I’m off to bed. A shakedown on the sofa. I wonder if it will be as comfortable as my last couple of nights in Caliburn?

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