Well that’s it, really! A cruise on the Rhein while Harry, the motorhome, waited at Oberbuschem, then south to Strasburg with an overnight at Bad Kreuznach.

From Salzburg to Tegernsee, where I hired a car for three days, then on to Egnach beside Lake Constance, from where I visited the Rheinfall. Into Alsace and home via Verdun and Berny-Riviere. Overnight both outgoing and homecoming at Surbiton.

All the outstanding places can be found online, with better pictures than mine (or some that look just the same!). What? You actually want to see some of mine? OK.

The Rhine cruise was called ‘Gilbert and Sullivan on the Rhein’, and there was a first-rate concert every evening (except day one) by a brilliant foursome and their pianist:

The weather was good, the scenery was wonderful and the companions I was lucky enough to join were the ‘icing on the cake’:

Villages, vineyards, fortresses, and excursions:

Salzburg was the most disappointing – because it rained on the day I booked a double sightseeing trip, first by bus, then by boat. This is the only photo really worth looking at:

There was a lovely lake, Chiemsee, beside the motorway between Salzburg and Munich, with a layby right beside it:

That’s my daft companion, Dippy Cat.

Tegernsee was gorgeous. I went up a nearby mountain in a cable car, sailed round the southern part of the lake, and visited some Austrian countryside:

Similarly, the sight of the Bodensee (Lake Constance) caused me to turn off from my planned route (insofar as I had a plan), and stay in what must be one of the best campsites / caravan parks in Europe. Only drawback was that there just wasn’t enough water to swim in!

I didn’t know about the Rheinfall before. They claim it’s the biggest waterfall in Europe, but I think that depends on whether you count Iceland as being in Europe. I have no opinion. Lots of pictures online, here’s one of mine:

No photos after that, except a couple of rather poor efforts of a swimming pool complex at one of the campsites on the way back through France (I was trying to be discreet), and a picture of the snails I had as a starter for my last-night-in-France treat at the restaurant. (Followed by scallops, which weren’t in the news then!)

Total distance in Harry, during exactly one month away: 3,652kms or 2,202 miles. I probably won’t do anything like it again. In fact, I’m thinking of trading in both Harry and my car for a smaller van, but with 5 seats for travelling and the possibility to sleep four – better for taking the families out.

(Thanks for looking at this – if you’re eager or just interested for more detail and more pictures, just click into the previous entries on the blog, or photo-journal as I prefer to call it. For chronological order, start with ‘An August Adventure’.)

Where were we? Oh yes, just reunited with Harry and Dippy on the campsite in Oberbischem:

Only 10am on Monday 6th August, and it’s very hot. Not planning to move on today, so I was able to get the whole week’s washing done and dried and have meals from what was already in Harry’s cupboard and what I’d bought when I asked the taxi driver to stop at a supermarket on the way back from Bensberg.

There had been many caravan parks/campsites along the Rhine, and I had thought that I might park up in one of them:

How about that converted bus for a motorhome?

However, I should probably have headed back to Cologne to follow the river from there, but I set the satnav to Mainz, and didn’t reach the Rhine until well further south. I crossed it on a ferry (a bit like Bowness (on Windermere) ) and found a caravan park at Bad Kreuznach:

You can see I kept well away from K*bl@nz! The caravan park was very nice, and with G&S still echoing in my head, the words “hung about with trellised vine” came easily to mind:

There was a lake at the side, and people were bathing in it, but with the lack of rain it looked a bit stagnant to me and, in spite of the heat, I didn’t fancy it.

So I moved on next morning (Wednesday 8th August) with Satnav set for Salzburg. I’d spotted a lake, the Chiemsee, right beside the motorway between Munich and Salzburg, and it looked very attractive from the pictures I saw – I was able to use a tablet (a freebie with Super U’s loyalty card from when we lived in France) – to look for stuff online, and there were lots of Campsites around, so I thought it would make a good spot to break the journey, and maybe stay a while.

I headed for a lakeside site near Prien, but it was full, so were two more I tried. It was getting late. My Satnav (new for this trip) had special content for caravaners and motorhomers (if you could find it!) so I searched for a motorhome stopover or something similar. It / she directed me to a spot not far away where there was a rough car park giving access to a beach, a landing stage, a café-restaurant, and public toilets. Overnight parking was allowed for €10 for just one night. A number of vans were already installed and more came – and a caravan – during what turned out to be a thunderstormy evening. But the night was quiet enough, and the location very attractive.

(Thursday 9th) People were arriving very early for their morning swim / canoeing / paddle boarding, but I wasn’t quite up for it. I found info about a campsite actually in Salzburg, and phoned ahead to see if there was space. I really nice man answered in English (presumably recognising the incoming call was from a UK number) and said they had pitches available, but they didn’t take reservations on the phone; the pitches were allocated on a first come / first served basis. I thought I should get there ASAP. It was only a short hop – sorry, Harry! a short drive; I know you don’t hop, you’ve told me before, – but as you can see on the map, Salzburg was just over the border into Austria. This meant stopping to buy a ‘vignette’, a window sticker, from a grumpy garage man. Without the sticker you risk heavy fines if you use the motorway. It’s an alternative to tolls, whereas Germany’s motorways are free and some sections have no speed limit! But limits appear frequently and there are many stretches of road works ….

I got to the campsite around midday, after shopping at a big SPAR just down the road and that nice man booked me in, apologetically explaining that their prices were for at least two people minimum. I had to shrug that off, though in the end he gave me a 10% discount. It was very hot; the site had a pleasant pool; I went for a swim.

The next day (Friday 10th) was a big disappointment! The receptionist had given me a lot of information and leaflets about excursions bookable at the site, and departing from the site. Salzburg, of course is famous for Mozart, The Sound of Music, and salt (Salz is German for salt, so ‘Salttown’). I chose a double sightseeing trip, first by bus, then by boat. But it rained! So the bus tour, though interesting, lacked the essential view of the mountains! When told that the mountain we were looking at (not!) was where the escape of the Von Trapps was shown in the film, we simply saw no mountain! (In fact the actual mountain over which they escaped to Switzerland was behind us, also not visible. Had they gone over the one used in the film, they would have gone down into Germany – oops!) Similarly, the boat trip afforded no views, and the most interesting bit was information about the design of the boat itself, made to cope with the strong current but shallow water. Fortunately, it didn’t rain quite all the day, because after the boat trip I had to make my own way to find a bus to take me back to the campsite. I sheltered from one shower by having a glass of Weißwein under the awning of a Gasthaus.

This is what the bus tour looked like most of the time:

And this is perhaps the only (half-way) good photo of the day:

Saturday 11th August : I’d identified my next park, near Tegernsee, which is both a town and a lake. At first this confused me, but it shouldn’t have, because for ‘see’ (pronounced ‘zay’) read ‘mere’ and remember that in Cumbria we have Windermere, Grasmere, Buttermere, all of which are both towns (or villages) and lakes, so there should be no need for confusion.

Using the motorway, the route goes back past Chiemsee, but travelling westbound, there’s a layby immediately beside the lake, where we stopped for lunch:

 

As you see, the weather was fine again, and when I got the first sight of the Tegernsee, I thought ‘I’m staying here for a few days – might hire a car and explore a bit’. The campsite was a bit weird and dated, with undefined pitches, but I parked up and sat in the sun for while, trying to make eye contact and greet anyone who came near. Folk didn’t seem to want to communicate.

Sunday (12th) was, not to put too fine a point on it, a miserable day. The weather was bad, and although I made – and enjoyed – a coq au vin for lunch, I then got a migraine and spent the afternoon in bed listening, when awake, to the rain battering the roof. At that point on that soggy Sunday, I couldn’t have known that the best days since the cruise were still to come, and I would have packed up and headed for home next day, but I had an echo of Carol telling me to persevere when I nearly gave up on my way to the Esperanto Congress in Gotenburg (2003) and the old Box no. 2 was playing up even before I left England … and the support team back in Yorkshire had swung into action! Chris had located a computer repair shop in the nearest village, and although the people at the campsite reception had told me there was no car hire firm anywhere nearby, Rachel had found three, one of which was within easy walking distance!

So at 9am Monday morning, 13th August (Carol’s birthday), I rang the nearest of the three car hire places. As we all know, ‘everyone speaks English’ ….. Oh, no, they don’t! The phone call and the subsequent paperwork etc. all had to be done in German. And why not? Of course, I made a mistake while walking to the dealer’s, turning the wrong way out of the lane* and going several hundred yards / metres in the wrong direction, into blinding sunlight with no hat or sunglasses …. I found McDonald’s and the computer shop, which were useful later, but three people I asked had no idea where this car hire place was, although one young lady who was waiting for a bus tried to find it on her phone, but still got it wrong, so that was some more walking the wrong way …. kind of her to try, though. Eventually, I retraced the route and found the place, only about 50 metres from the lane end where the campsite is! So I drove back to Harry in this big, black, shiny new Opel, and for the first time a conversation opened up with the neighbours! First the man opposite came across, followed by his wife. “Ist dass der neue Opel?” Is it the new Opel? I don’t know – I suppose so, I’ve just hired it. Two more men arrived to admire the vehicle and, apparently, to discuss cars with each other … the conversation went on without me, as they stood around admiring ‘my’ car!

*The campsite was situated in ‘Rainerweg’, correct pronunciation, I presume, ‘Riner – vek’, but Satnav kept calling it what it looks like to English eyes. She knew to pronounce the neutral ‘e’ (as in ‘the’) at the end of ‘Straße’, (and that ß was equivalent to a double s)but that was about it. Some of her distortions when we got to France were even more amusing. But then, I guess some Brits would be more helped by wrong versions than by correct pronunciation. I wonder what foreign Satnavs make of English place names, not to mention Welsh ones?!

Tourist office next (campsite reception useless), where a nice young lady in …..’attractive’ Bavarian costume gave me not much more advice than I could find in the leaflets I’d picked up, then McDonald’s, for the wifi, and the computer shop. A young man who did speak English took the laptop in for observation, saying he would do what he could in three days.

So I set off to explore, and, not quite intentionally, drove the full circuit of the lake:

Finding myself more or less back at base – the campsite is in Rottach-Egern – I had lunch at Harry:

Then in the afternoon I took the road south, crossing back into Austria, then up a side road into what looked like typical Austrian countryside: 

The return drive was slightly spoiled by two things, a thunderstorm and a recurring tummy upset. I won’t go into details.

Two attractions seemed to be calling: a boat trip round the lake, and a ride in the cable car up Wallberg. However, Tuesday’s weather seemed unpromising, though as it happens, it turned out better than I feared, so I decided to postpone the treats till Wednesday. This is where I might have been more adventurous had I received more detailed advice at the tourist office. I think I may have missed out on some good spots. As it was, I drove round the nearest mountain (or one of them) to the Spitlingsee:

Understand that there’s no straight line from Rottach-Egern to this little lake (the red marker). The route was from the northern end of Tegernsee and round past Schliersee. This outing gave me my most expensive picnic spot! €4 and I only stayed an hour – the charge was for the whole day … I think the attendant was surprised to see me leave!

THAT would have been the straight line from Harry!

From now on, choosing the photos to show becomes difficult again, as on the Rhine cruise. I took so many! Wednesday 15th was indeed a double treat. First, the cable car ride to just below the summit of Wallberg (1772m / 5183ft) – I didn’t complete the ascent on foot – lunch at the ‘panoramic’ restaurant – a cabin to myself on the way down – and the boat trip round the southern part of Tegernsee.

Apart from those already deleted I have 83 pictures of all that, including a couple of videos! I selected 15, and paired them down to 10. Wallberg first:

Then the lake trip:

 

 

So the three day car hire had been a success, with only minor setbacks. After returning the car on Thursday 16th soon after 9, I had to settle up for the 5-night stay on the campsite. A ‘new’ man at the window – that’s all ‘reception’ was – told me they took only German cards … I would have to go to Aldi to get cash from the ATM on the same site. I offered to give him my passport back. He said (in English) “You’ll come back – I know you’ll come back.” That was the nicest thing anyone had said to me for five days! All that was left was to park up at McD’s for a bit of wifi (and a breakfast bun) and collect the computer from the shop where they declared it ‘dead’, though someone with more time might be able to recover my documents and photos; then set the Satnav for a lake among the mountains in Switzerland and get under way …. But we never got to that lake …. I wonder what it would have been like ….

Why we didn’t get there, and what we did instead, which involved the best caravan park EVER and Europe’s biggest waterfall, will be explained next time ….

Sail away, sail away, sail away ….. well, drive away, anyway.