… the 13th that is the day for things going wrong. So Wednesday 13th must be the day reserve for disasters because, believe me, we’ve had one of those today – and a major one at that too.
In fact it started off as we meant to go along. I had climbed most of the way up to the Schloss here at Tittmoning and it was on stopping to take my first photo that I realised that I had forgotten to put the memory card back in the camera last night.
Consequently I had to walk all the way back down to Caliburn, recover the memory card from the laptop, fit it into the camera, and climb back up the hill.
Finally I made it into the Schloss and had a good wander around.
I did mention last night that it had something of a sinister reputation. This was where British civilian internees, including many people deported by the Germans from the Channel Islands, ended up if they had been naughty, and if they were naughty here, the next (and final) stop was inevitably Buchenwald.
And that does remind me – something I said a few days ago – while many people criticise what they perceive as a lack of resolution by French and other occupied nations, I’ve yet to see one of these critics say anything about a similar stance taken by the vast majority of the (British) inhabitants of the Channel Islands.
But I digress.
I continue my walk around the Schloss and I’m impressed by the silence here. I seem to be the only person up here admiring the beautiful buildings.
I end up at the museum, because there is a museum on site and, as you might expect, theres a sign “Closed until 13:00”. That was rather odds-on, wasn’t it?
I also mentioned last night that Tittmoning was only about 400 metres from the Austrian border. So with the aim of visiting as many countries as possible, Caliburn and I cross what is a totally unguarded frontier. Hooray for the Schengen Agreement.
And despite the protests from the Lady Who Lives In The Satnav, we continue in Austria for a little while in order to see what is happening, nearly crushing a party of little kiddy learner-cyclists on our way around.
After a drive of about 20 kms we cross back into Germany at the town of Laufen.
This is quite a beautiful little town, right on the border between Austria and Germany, and the two countries are linked by a gorgeous girder bridge. It was built at the turn of the 20th Century and refurbished a couple of years ago.
And if you want to know why I’m being so vague about everything, read on.
Laufen, a beautiful gated medieval city was also the site of a Prisoner-of-War camp somewhere in the vicinity. Oflag VII-C was quite a famous one from which a couple high-profile escapes were made, and which later became a civilian internment camp.
The President of the ruling council of Guernsey was one of the civilian detainees here at Laufen, and Patrick Reid, a Colditz escapee and writer of several books about P-O-W life, including the book on which the film and TV series “The Colditz story” was based, was probably the most famous military prisoner.
Not knowing exactly where Oflag VII-C had been situated, I wandered off to the Town Hall to make enquiries. Thats always the first port of call on any occasion such as this.
However, as anyone who has followed my adventures for any length of time might expect, The Town Hall is “closed exceptionally” today and there was no-one there.
No surprise here then.
So that was the end of that then. Back on the road once more, Caliburn and I headed to Eching, in the suburbs of Munich (and only a couple of kilometres from Dachau)
My old school-friend Hans runs an archery club, called Sherwood Forest, here and they have recently moved into larger premises.
It was club-night tonight so he took me along to see the activity there and I was quite impressed with the set-up. I was invited to have a go but I declined, not out of fear of showing everyone up by my prowess, but the fact that with a bow and arrow in my hand I’m a danger to everyone around me, except of course the enemy.
Now right at the very beginning, I talked about disasters. And quite right too. because on booting up the laptop to load up todays work, the laptop failed. The thing is only booting up part-way through the notmal opening cycle and then flashing up an error message “Your computer has encountered a problem and must close down. We are collecting details of the error and then your computer will restart”. And then it restarts and at exactly the same point in the boot-up process, it all starts again.
In fact, this is more than a disaster. Its a calamity. And I wish that I knew where all of my old notes were from T223, the Open University’s computer course that I followed, where we learnt (and I have since forgotten) how to hack our way into failed disks and extract all of the information.
All help on this subject will be gratefully received.
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