The Romantic Road

The Romantic Road's one of Germany's most popular tourist routes, stretching 290km from Würzburg in the north to Füssen in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. It's actually a contrived route - the result of a very successful marketing campaign by the 26 municipalities on the road, all after the tourist dollar.

We stopped at Dinkelsbühl and Nördlingen - both very pretty medieval towns, with complete city ramparts, cobblestone streets and huge 16th century houses, many with carvings and paintings depicting biblical and mythological themes. Some of the houses are so huge you can't believe they were ever housing just one family - most now appear to be in several apartments.

Started to rain quite hard as we were heading to Füssen in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. It's mainly a base for those going to the castles at Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau but it has a 15th-century castle of its own which was once used by the bishops of Augsburg as a summer palace.

Germany doesn't just have romantic roads, it has very, very fast roads. Generally there's no speed limit on the autobahns and yesterday Andrew got up to 196 kph, stopped from reaching 200 kph only by a BMW pulling out in front of him. You do have to look out for that - drivers seem to think nothing of pulling out into the fast lane despite a very fast moving car coming up behind them. It's an amazing road system though - I don't think you can ever be much more than 20 minutes from a motorway. You can do large distances really quickly and we have - I noticed today they we've already done 1,450km!

Rothenburg ob der Tauber

Rothenburg obT's billed as the best-preserved medieval city in Europe. We stayed in a little, old (very creaky floorboards - no sneaking in and out there unnoticed) guest house inside the city walls. Our room was full of old, painted furniture and I just have to tell you about German bed linen protocol. Double beds tend to be singles pushed together but each with completely separate bed linen. Separate fitted sheets and there's a neatly-folded individual duvet at the bottom of each bed but what's most interesting is what they do with the pillows. They're the large European ones which they stand up on its side and then enthusiastically karate-chop it right down the middle so it looks like you have a pair of giant ears at the head of each bed. Most bizarre!



Rothenburg itself is lovely - a very attractive place of half-timbered buildings, magnificent churches and covered ramparts - parts of the town hall date from 1250. You actually quite quickly get blase about the age of things - "puh, that's not even 500 years old"! Went to the Criminal Museum, supposed to be the only one of its kind in Europe. The collection gives an insight into the laws and punishments of medieval days. All pretty brutal - chastity belts, shame masks, a shame flute for bad musicians and even a cage for bakers who baked bread too small or too light. And you certainly didn't want to be a witch!

Huge numbers of tourists there and at least 75% of the shops must be souvenir/gift shops, including several Xmas shops. Apparently traditional German Xmas decorations are very popular all around the world now. The local specialty is Schneeballen (snow balls), billed as "round, sugar-coated pastries, fattening but delicious". They are huge, about the size of a base ball and look really good but are, in fact, horrible. However else we get fat this holiday (and believe me we are putting considerable focussed effort into it), it won't be by eating Schneeballen!

Of castles and cars

Left Heidelberg and drove for a while along the Neckar River - castles, ruined and otherwise, are on the hills wherever you look. Walked around a little town called Eberbach, whose claim to fame is that Queen Victoria was conceived there. Apparently her parents were on an extended holiday there nine months before she was born. In a controversial claim, some local historians assert she was actually born there, on board the family's yacht moored in the Neckar and even state that due to anti-German sentiment, they took their new-born daughter to England and claimed she'd been born on British soil. The debate apparently continues - possibly only in Erbach!


Then headed down the autobahn to Stuttgart and went through the Porsche and Mercedes museums. Both in amazing, purpose-built buildings with heaps of cars on display. In the Mercedes museum, in particular, the cars were in absolutely immaculate condition - they must be cleaned and polished every day because they positively gleam. There must be well over 100 vehicles on display - cars, trucks, motorbikes, service vehicles - and they also had a really interesting historical narrative, not strictly related to the cars. The collection includes the world's two oldest cars - Gottlieb Daimler's horseless carriage and Carl Benz's 3-wheeled automobile from 1886. A hand-made limo built in the 1930s for the Emperor of Japan and the first Popemobile are also on display. I particularly liked the cars with the sophisticated means of bonnet closure of straps and buckles. Saw Porsche police cars - boy, officers who get a Porsche as their squad car must be pretty happy I'd say!

Heidelberg

Walked miles today exploring Heidelberg. Nice sunny day after last night’s heavy rain. Heidelberg’s a medieval town on the Neckar River. Apparently there’s a castle on every bend of the river, once home to the German royal families of Hohenstaufen and Hohenzollern. It’s one of the few German cities that wasn’t leveled by air raids in WWII and has original buildings from the later Middle Ages and early Renaissance. It’s a university town – has been since 1386 but a student told us today it’s been proven it’s actually since 1100 something! Very popular with tourists, as we soon found out – huge groups of Germans, Americans and Japanese. Can’t imagine what it must be like in the height of the tourist season, July and August.

Walked up the hill to Heidelberg Castle (the building you see above the bridge in the photo). The guidebook said it was a very steep walk which can take 30 or 40 minutes, depending on your stamina. I don’t know who they test these times on – a skinny little kid pushing his overweight granny in a wheelchair perhaps. We did it in well under 10 minutes! It’s a ruin now. After remodeling in the 16^th century, it became one of Germany’s most beautiful Renaissance residences. However its splendor was extinguished by the 30 Years’ War and the 1689 war with France, during which much of the structure was destroyed. It has fabulous views down onto the town and the Neckar River. The Wine Vat Building houses the Great Cask, a symbol of the exuberant life of the inhabitants. It’s a huge barrel, capable of holding more than 228,000 litres of wine! The castle also houses the German Apothecary Museum, with utensils and lab equipment from the 18^th and 19^th centuries. As Andrew said, who’d have thought an apothecary museum would be so interesting. Surprisingly, it was!

The Maginot Line – Fort Schoenenbourg

Left Lorraine for Alsace – drove through beautiful countryside, very neat and orderly. Lots of little villages – when they’re just a collection of houses, they don’t look much but add a spire or a tower (usually a church) and the scene is transformed into something really picturesque and special. Rather like towers on houses in Italy. Went through a little place called Hunspach, signposted as one of the prettiest villages in France. Deservedly so but definitely not the place to leave your lawns for one more week before mowing them! The style of the buildings has changed – very Germanic looking with half timbers and geraniums.

We were heading for Fort Schoenenbourg, one of the 2,000 fortresses on the Maginot Line. Apparently it was the most heavily bombarded structure on the line. In spite of the incessant attack, the fort maintained its defence capability. Its guns fired more than 17,000 shells in retaliation. They were never conquered and the crew at Schoenenbourg only laid down their weapons on the formal order of the French High Command, six days after the Armistice took effect.

You go 30 metres underground and walk around a 2.8km circuit – you see all the weaponry (some very big guns there), where the 650 men were fed and slept, the infirmary, electrical power plant and the command post – it’s really a subterranean city, they had the means to survive with no contact with the outside world for three months. When you think about it, huge parts of Europe must have such underground systems. As you drive away, you see lots of evidence of former installations, now overgrown in local fields.

It had rained on and off for most of the day but when we were heading for Heidelberg in the late afternoon, it just poured. Not particularly comfortable when you’re on the autobahn, there’s no speed limit and powerful Mercs and BMWs are speeding all around you. Thankfully Andrew was driving!

Metz

Metz is a really pretty little medieval town at the confluence of the Moselle and Seille rivers. 20 bridges criss-cross the rivers and canals and there are heaps of parks and green spaces. Metz is the capital of Lorraine and has always been a pawn in the game of border chess – annexed by Germany in 1870, regained by France in 1918. Quite a few of the city’s most impressive buildings date from the 48-year period when Metz was part of the German Reich.

Beautiful weather when we arrived – 32° at 5.30pm. To go into town, we pass the railway station – a massive building designed to detrain 100,000 of the Kaiser’s troops and their gear in just 24 hours – should great power rivalries make this necessary. Then there’s the Place St Louis – a beautiful triangular square surrounded by medieval arcades and houses dating from the 14^th – 16^th centuries. Really impressive city ramparts but the most amazing thing has to be the Cathédrale St Etienne – it’s a gigantic Gothic cathedral with flying buttresses and long-necked gargoyles. It’s famed for its curtains of stained-glass windows (13^th – 20^th centuries), including two by Chagall. The place is incredibly tall and there’s stained glass simply everywhere you look – I’ve never seen anything like it.

And Scarlet was right!

Absolutely no need to panic at all – Bristol and Paris airports were both open! In fact I was more concerned about sleeping through my 4am alarm – it would be a shame after the worry of the ash, to miss the plane! Arrived in Paris just after 9am, got my pack (well done Air France – you’re now on a 50% success rate with my luggage) and was setting out for the train platform where Andrew and I had arranged to meet (so romantic) when I spotted this fellow holding up a teensy little boarding pass with THOMAS written on it – were we glad to see each other! Andrew wouldn’t have been at all happy driving around France alone while I spent days queuing for the Eurostar or a ferry to Calais!

We picked up our lease car – a very stylish dark gray Renault Megane. Andrew had come all the way from NZ, so I drove. I now have a new best friend – Jane GPS. She has revolutionised driving abroad for us – no more peering at maps and arguing over directions, she’s brilliant! Tells you where to go, what lane to be in, warns you of speed cameras, when you’re speeding, local points of interest – there is no end to her skills! We were going 290km to Metz, so decided to take the toll road to get there quicker – not cheap but so fast. Minimum of two lanes, the speed limit’s generally 130kph and very little travel compared with the free motorway. We told Jane the address of the hotel and she took us straight there, no problem!

Wales, Wales!

Leaving Bath, I drove a very picturesque route to visit friends in Wiltshire – David worked for Anchor Foods in Swindon and did a stint at the Dairy Board in Wellington. The road went through some quintessential pretty English villages. Had a lovely morning sitting in their garden, drinking coffee and reminiscing. Probably the last time I was warm in UK – it was freezing! Leaving David and Barbara, I blatted down the M4 to Carmarthen in West Wales (got the warm fuzzies when Brooke Fraser came on radio 2!) to be welcomed to the bosom of my family. It was a full-on 4 days – I was running on a tight schedule to fit in all the friends and family I wanted to catch up with but it was great – wonderful to see everyone again. That said, when I was with my aunts and uncles, I could understand only about 70% of what they said – they start off in English, then lapse into Welsh, remember I’m there, apologise and go back to English, lapse into Welsh etc etc. It’s hilarious.

It’s a very beautiful part of Wales but interesting how it’s changing. One of my uncles said that Llangynog, the village where my father grew up, has changed more in the last 12 months than in the last 50 years. Many of the small farms are being bought up and joined into one huge business, milking extraordinary numbers of cows. One farm now milking many more than all the smaller farms put together. He’s the only one of my father’s family who still lives there but the Thomases would have known everyone, and everyone would have known the Thomases. He says now he passes people when he’s out walking and has no idea who they are – and he’s not going to find out because they don’t acknowledge his greeting. Many of the people who live there now commute to Swansea (45 minutes away) and the local school has closed down and is now for sale. I’ll be looking out for it on Grand Designs! Sad the way things are changing.

Then came the drama of the Icelandic volcano spewing ash over Scotland and Northern England and closing airports up there on Tuesday. I was due to fly out of Bristol on Wednesday to meet Andrew in Paris and my cousin’s husband took great delight in gloomily predicting the ash was heading south and I’d be stuck there for months. “One of my friends was in Tenerife last year when it happened and couldn’t get back for 8 weeks!” “I don’t know why you think it’s so funny,” I said. “If it turns out that I can’t leave, guess where I’ll be coming back to to sit out the months of waiting?” That wiped the smile off his face! That said, the tv and radio were both predicting wide-spread air travel chaos as well.

Oh God, just the thought of what would happen if I couldn’t get to Paris made me feel queasy – what on earth would we do? I decided I wouldn’t think about it then, I’d think about it tomorrow if there was a problem – Scarlet O’Hara would have been proud!

Left Wales to drive back to Bristol. As my flight was at 6.45am, I wanted to return the rental car to the airport the previous night. What a pig of a place that is to find! You drive for miles and miles and they don’t put signposts sufficiently regularly to reassure you you’re on the right road. Spent my last night in England staying in a beautiful thatched farmhouse in the country, complete with two Labradors (one golden, one black) and a cat – very peaceful.

PS Singapore

Something I meant to comment on that amused me in Singapore. I saw a couple of gangs of two guys – one was dusting the high streets signs, while the second took a photo of him doing it! I’m thinking they have pretty low unemployment in Singapore!

Beautiful Bath

Picked up my rental car in Bristol and then drove, without incident, to Bath. My British friends are always surprised that I drive in Bath and I can never remember what they’re worried about – until I drive there again. The place is a nightmare – narrow roads, one-way systems, insane volumes of traffic and, most annoying of all, absolutely nowhere to stop (yellow lines everywhere) to ask for directions! My B&B was up on the hills overlooking the town – when I got there it was lovely but finding it – suffice it to say it wasn’t easy because, oh, the other thing about Bath is that street names clearly don’t fit with the ideals of the Bath Beautification Society.

But it is a gorgeous place – it was a bit drizzly when I was there but it didn’t matter. The buildings are just gorgeous and Pulteney Bridge, the Abbey, Nash’s Circle and The Crescent are always worth a return visit. When the sun came out in the early evening, the buildings looked just beautiful. Wandering around the town you can really imagine how it was in the times of Beau Brummel and Jane Austen – the town owes a lot to her! Tourists flock there to relive her novels. Clearly too early for many tourists but every second person seemed to have a Welsh accent – “have they set up an outpost here?”, I wondered. It appears they come over the border by the coachload for the shopping. Seems a bit odd to me, given you get the same shops everywhere in the UK!

Just before 9pm that night, my pack was delivered by a very friendly taxi driver – clearly well used to delivering lost luggage!

Merde, it happened again...

Why me? On aisle seat of two from Singapore to Munich - in window seat sat one sentagenarian from Sarajevo (now living in Adelaide) who was travelling all the way from Adelaide to Sarajevo with no book, no crossword puzzles, just the intention that the person in the next seat would be his in-flight entertainment. He was very keen to talk but I was really tired after the day in Singapore and took a sleeping pill as soon as we boarded - was out like a light and didn't even hear the meal cart come around. In the morning, he said to me in admiring tones - 'You sleep like baby - is very good'!

Uneventful changes in Munich and Paris though you have to walk huge distances now the airports are so big. Must make air travel increasingly difficult for those with mobility problems. At Munich, we got on a bus which took us from the terminal to the plane - we were going so long, you wondered if you were actually driving to Paris! Very different kind of passengers at Munich - I think I was the only woman on the plane amongst all the impeccably dressed businessmen in their natty suits and designer rimless glasses reading newspapers. In the departure lounge, I sat opposite a man in a lilac shirt with lilac socks and lilac laces in his highly-polished brown brogues - not a sight you'd often see in Wellington! Paris airport is now so big that you take a subway between terminals.

I was first off the plane in Bristol and skipped through Immigration, even before the sniffer dog had woken up. Still, as it turns out, I might as well not have bothered as Air France had yet again lost my luggage - this time at least, unlike the last, they knew where it was. Well, Brussels and Bristol are pretty similar, easy to see how they could make such a mistake. They thought it would arrive that day, in which case it would be delivered to me in Bath but it was really no problem if it had to come to South Wales later in the week.... Then had a fight to get back the £2 I'd paid for a luggage trolley for which I then had no use - yes, it is only £2 but it's the principle!

After that, I needed to blow off steam, so I decided to walk to the rental car place rather than phone to be picked up. Got lots of odd looks as I stomped away from the terminal - you don't actually see many people walking to and from the airport!

Singapore is HOT HOT HOT

Oh boy, this place is HOT and very muggy.

Uneventful trip from Auckland apart from my travelling companions - WHY ME???????? and why can't they take a hint???? Do I look like the sort of friendly individual who wants to chat for hours to people she's never seen before? Very nice couple from Paraparaumu, who were going to Europe for the first time to see their daughter who lives in London but man, could she talk! She could and she did. "I'm sure you won't mind helping us out with our silly questions", says she. Could just about cope when he asked about the mysteries of seat reclining but a 10-minute lecture on the supper served at 2am had me lobbing sleeping pills down my throat!



I found a hop off-hop on bus, which was good because I got to see how the place is laid out. I have been here before - when I first went to London after varsity - but don't remember much. Don't even remember the Singapore River - maybe they've done it since! Wandered into Raffles Hotel - partaking of afternoon tea seemed to be the thing to do there - a mere snip at S$65 p.p.! Went on the Singapore Flyer, Singapore's answer to the London Eye - basically a big ferris wheel that you can't fall out of. It's touted as the world's largest giant observation wheel (the world's smallest giant anything is kind of hard to imagine) - towers 165 metres about the city. You do get a fantastic 360 view - one rotation takes 30 minutes.

Went to the Botannic Gardens - very lush and green. I'd read that you generally have the place to yourself but came to the eventual conclusion (correct) that it must be a public holiday because the place was packed with families pinicking and playing games. Wandered through Chinatown then got the metro back to the airport. (Metro is amazing - very quick and efficient but not much use for the desperate. Double doors - one set on the train and one on the platform, so no chance of ending it all by throwing yourself onto the tracks.) Am holed up in a transit lounge (thank God for hot showers), waiting for my next flight after 11pm. I'm thinking a couple of strong black coffees to make sure I don't fall asleep!

And she's off...

Well, nearly. Heading for the airport in about half an hour for my trip to Bath - via the scenic route. Auckland/Singapore (fly in 6am'ish, out 11pm'ish), Munich, Paris and finally, Bath. Though why I'm leaving this glorious weather, I'm not sure - perhaps because it's threatening to pack up in the next few days, winter is coming apparently. That said, the temperatures in England aren't too inviting. Hopefully the next entry will be a little (much) more interesting - will report on my fun-filled day in Singapore.