… with tonight’s hotel – and spectacularly too.<\/p>\n
But not so with the hotel from last night and where I am this morning. Not that I was there for much of the time of course because I was elsewhere for much of it.<\/p>\n
I was at some kind of airport waiting for a flight, but someone needed me to take a bicycle across to somewhere else on the site. I had this huge suitcase with me and I was wondering how I could manage to take it with me on the bike, otherwise I’d have to come back for it and that wouldn’t be very easy.
\nAnd somewhere mixed up in all of this I was on a road halfway up a mountain. It was summer and I was enjoying the scenery and the weather. But then news came out that I had to take a coach with holidaymakers to a village nearby. And by now it was winter and they wanted to go to ski. No big deal, until I learnt that the hotel where they would be staying was several miles away and this involved some tricky driving in some dreadful weather conditions, and twice a day too.<\/p>\n
And having had a decent sleep, I wasup and about quite early, showered, breakfasted and having done all that needs to be done.<\/p>\n
First stop was of course the town itself. It’s a very pretty city on the edge of the Schwartzwald – the Black Forest – with lots of nice things to see.<\/p>\n
And this was one of the reasons why I wanted to come here. Whenever I’ve been in the area I’ve always driven around the ring road and never actually had the time to come in and admire the view. <\/p>\n
So today I went to put that right.<\/p>\n
But the major claim to fame is that Donaueschingen is said to be the source of the River Danube, the longest river in Europe at something like 2850 kilometres.<\/p>\n
And that’s where it’s said to begin, down there in that spring. This is probably the biggest tourist attraction in the city and this is why I’m here.<\/p>\n
On my way out of town I stumbled across a LIDL so I stocked up the supplies. And a big difference between a German one and a French one is that here they sell hummus, and vegan hummus at that too. <\/p>\n
Somewhere along the route I came across a village that had its war memorial on prominent display. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have talked about German war memorials before.<\/p>\n
In the UK he situation seems to be that there were about three times the casualties in World War I than in World War II. In Germany, while the World War I losses were comparable with those of the UK, the situation is reversed in that there are three times as many deaths in the latter war.<\/p>\n
And most of the deaths – by far the most – took place in the final two years of the War. From the fall of Stalingrad onwards, these must have been cataclysmic times for the German soldier.<\/p>\n
Another surprise awaited me further along the road.<\/p>\n
Ruined castles and the like are things that are quite common to find in many parts of Western Europe, but in Germany they are quite rare.<\/p>\n
And so I was impressed to see what looked like medieval stone ruins here at the side of the road.<\/p>\n
But not even that could surprise me as much as this.<\/p>\n
And I bet that many people won’t ever remember having seen one of these in their lifetime, and I’m certainly surprised to see one even now, especially with a green “pollution control” sticker in the windscreen.<\/p>\n
This is an IFA-Wartburg 353, made in East Germany from the 1960s up until the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Sold in the UK as the “Wartburg Knight”, they had three-cylinder two-stroke engines and the pollution was legendary.<\/p>\n
Only 9 moving parts in the engine, all of which used to go wrong and you could never find the spares to repair them.<\/p>\n
Seeing one still alive, and with a pollution control sticker, is extraordinary.<\/p>\n
For lunch I found a nice quiet corner to sit and relax in the heat, and then headed off out of the mountains.<\/p>\n
This is where the traffic queues began and it was a nightmare to fight my way through the roadworks and the accidents.<\/p>\n
At last I hit the Rhine where I could relax by the water for a while.<\/p>\n
Having safely negotiated Karlsruhe I found the Rhine again, and it’s always a bad idea for me to see a ferry. It always makes me cross, as you know.<\/p>\n
So more traffic queues, arguing with German drivers, all that sort of thing. And I eventually tracked down my hotel.<\/p>\n
That wasn’t made easy by the fact that the street has been cut in two by a new by-pass and The Lady Who Lives In The Sat-Nav couldn’t work it out.<\/p>\n
Now you know that bitter experience has taught me to check out the area before booking into a hotel. Well, this is the old railway station and it’s on a busy line. <\/p>\n
The whole area is derelict and while the room itself is reasonable, it’s stifling hot and the noise from the railway right outside the window is deafening.<\/p>\n
But at least the new plug on the slow cooker works okay. That’s one thing. <\/p>\n
