Barb and Baden’s Excellent Return to Germany – Part 3
Lakefront Views
There’s something about the water that draws us. Having waterfront property automatically is more valuable and most of us look forward to going to a beach to get away from it all. We’ve been here in the lakeside town of Konstanz for a few days and we haven’t seen crowds like this in any other part of of German trip so far
We’ve been really lucky that since we’ve stepped off the plane in Frankfurt about a week ago we have seen about 1 hour of rain – the rest non-stop sunshine, mostly in the mid 20’s. I was thinking that this great weather seems to make being here in the Bodensee area all the better as we were taking on a short ferry ride across the lake over to the small town of Meersburg this morning. The warm sunshine made the spectacular views of the town from the ferry that much more spectacular (see the picture below of Meersburg).
Meersburg is one of those old medieval towns that has a small, walled inner town with a castle and the new part of the town that subsequently grew outside of the original walls as the town prospered. Of course "new" still means about 500 years old so don’t get the impression that it was built last year. One of the most impressive parts of Meersburg is the view from the water as it has a colourful row of buildings along a single street along the water and up above can be seen the old castle and a newer winery that was built later on.
Zeppelin Town
The name of the hotel we are staying in here in Konstanz is called the Graf Zeppelin Hotel. We happened to just stumble across it when we arrived in town on Thursday but the name immediately struck me as the name of the company that made the well known zeppelin the Hindenburg. As it turns out, the founder of that company, Count von Zeppelin was born in Konstanz, hence the affiliation. While I’m not an expert on zeppelins, I’m pretty sure that the Zeppelin company made at least one other zeppelin that didn’t blow up like the Hindenburg. Unfortunately, zeppelins, the Hindenburg and blowing up all seem to be connected in most people’s minds.
Bavaria Bound
I must have spoken too soon about all of that good weather. On Saturday when we were planning on leaving Konstanz it started to rain and didn’t let up until the next day. We we thinking about staying another day in Konstanz or maybe even moving to Lindau which is at the other end of the Bodensee but with all of the rain we decided to keep driving towards München (Munich) which was only another couple of hours drive.
Not only had the weather turned wet but it dropped about 10 degrees as it was about 12-13 degrees from the previous sunny, mid-20’s the day before. We had to attempt to extend the booking on our hotel in München and this turned out to be fairly easy since we had the cell phone that we had purchased in Mainz on our first day. We had come to use the cell phone several times since we bought it and in many cases it made the hours driving in the car useful time to make or change bookings. One of the problems that we had using the phone was that some of the phone numbers are not always dialed as they are published. The best analogy is that if you dial a number in Canada, sometimes you have to add a "1" in front and sometimes not. Everyone just knows when to use the 1 and when not to. Similarly, there are things that everyone here seems to know like having to put a "0" in front of the number. Before we figured this out we would go to a shop and ask the clerk "how do you dial this phone number"? like we had just come from another planet or something.
The Bells
One of the things that Barb and I always associate with being in Europe are the church bells. There’s something about waking up in a hotel room (especially on a Sunday morning) and hearing the church bells – especially if we’re located near a huge cathedral as we often seem to be. Now I realize that we have church bells in Vancouver but the thing is that we don’t hear them from our house so it’s not something that we identify with home. One of our best memories is being in Germany in 2001 on New Year’s eve (called Sylvester in Germany) just after midnight and opening the doors to hear the church bells ringing in the local town. We were told that church bells would be ringing all over Germany at that moment.
As I write this section it is Sunday and our second day in München as we arrived yesterday in the pouring rain. Of course with it being Sunday pretty much everything is closed today so we walked around exploring the city at a leisurely pace. When we woke up this morning we were relived to see that the weather had changed for the better and we had our sunshine back again although it was a bit cooler that we had seen in the Bodensee area (it was now in the mid-high teens).
My final chapter of Barb and Baden’s Excellent Return to Germany will conclude with our move to our final and perhaps most anticipated destination of this trip: Berlin.
Baden

