Pushing and shoving the bags around has become tedious, so when we found out that just to get from Munich to Frieburg was 5 trains, and would cost a bomb we sat in the HauptBahnhof Starbucks for an hour, on the free wireless. It also left us with little good news about other transport around Bavaria. We settled for a rental car.
At Oktoberfest, Rocking horse shit is easier to get.
Sixt, no cars, Hertz, no cars, Avis, no cars.
We got the only car left at the Europcar desk, (because it's Oktoberfest) a Holden (OPEL) Astra wagon, fortunately cheap.
It's got only 000138 K's on the clock and due to some confusion with the parking arrangments at the Haupbahnhof, it took 45 minutes after we got the keys to put 1 more K on it.
But the car goes Ok, so we picked down south for a look (without crossing the border).
A few hours with stops, a lovely drive towards the mountains later and we had a picture postcard view from the hotel room balcony location next to Der Tegernsee.
This location was recommended by Russell, our newly appointed tour guide, and it's just a delight. We sat there on the balcony, soaking up the last of the sun with a cold drink, toasting our good fortune, once again.
The Hotel, however, perched on the lakeside, has the towns main drag right past the front, and traffic only had ebbed a little by 11pm, and was it back to the woosh-woosh-woosh noises by 7am. The double glazed windows were there for a reason.
We joined the noises fairly early after breakfast, keen to get further east toward Freiburg.
TomTomShenanigans
22nd September
We left the stunning hotel of the side of the Tegernsee heading north east for the best way to Frieburg in the Black Forest.
The coarse paper maps we have make it difficult, with my 49 year old eyes trying to separate things like Kirchenberg from Kirchenberg Ost (if the Ost really appears on the map), and roadlines that have crayon-like detail.
We discovered quickly that Bavaria has really high quality roads, but they dont seem to join up in a useful way.
I have been suffering a little more than usual from the old brain fade, and could not remember how to do the most simple things. It took a full hour of dicking around with side roads and the paper map etc until I finally got the Tomtom to tell me how to get to a city by name. Knowing it was my fault, all along actually prevented me from hurtling the object into a passing river out of frustration.
Even with that, today's half day session with the TomTom resulted in the most bizarre occurences. We seemed to travel for 50 minutes and only make 20 km worth of progress, ducking in and out of towns, onto the highway then back off again, then we'd magically catch up with the desired progress on the chances we got to overtake the endless runs of trucks. As it was I think we took over three hours to get less than 200 road Km today.
At one stage we were bombing (not a war metaphor) down a single lane road that seemed to join up one farmhouse to another, ducking and weaving down this road, then a hairpin backwards down to another one, past the fronts of houses and barns to a road that seemed to join up with the one we just left. It was at least entertaining, and the locals must have wondered what these yobs in the Astra were doing in their patch.
I rechecked the preferences on the Tomtom. No hints of what was wrong, and a tortuous path, that is, not a single stretch of straight road longer than 1 km, but it did eventually get us there.
Some GIS expert. Can't read a f......g map, can't drive a GPS.
All Bavaria seems to be the Cheesebelt of Germany, away from the cities there are just green pastures, signs for "Kase" and bloody cows everywhere, and not a single landmark, (save this one....) Some lovely pieces of road though.
The frustration finally ended when we found a suitable place to stay on the side of Der Bodensee, known by that name by the Germans, and called Lake Constance by the Swiss, who occupy the other side. The lake is really big but you can see the Swiss side, and if the haze had cleared I imagined you might fully see the Alps behind instead of just a vague silhouette.
Today we found it stretched out, utterly still, with an azure sky, and the lake after sundown was as an enormous sheet of glass.
A nice deep bath means the clutch foot feels a little better, and I can catch up with the blog after an early night.
Aufwiedersehen
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