Saturday 7 July 2018

Saturday 7 July - Bonndorf and Blumberg

Where's Bertie? He's at a Stellplatz at Blumberg. It costs €7 per night, plus €1.50pppn tourist tax, plus €1 per day for electricity. Exact location: 47.83957, 8.54225.
Weather: Mainly sunny, but with some dark clouds drifting in every now and then.

Last night's parking spot was rather nice. This morning's breakfast spot was less so, but it was practical: the car park of Lidl in Bonndorf. The plan was: breakfast in a location with a phone signal, then whilst I shopped, Mick would go and check out the town, to make sure there was somewhere to watch the football before we paid out for the Stellplatz.

With both outings successful, we then encountered a problem: the Stellplatz was closed.

There was an easy Plan B - the one that had already been in place for the event of there not being a sports bar in town: we would go to Blumberg instead.

There was almost a late change of plan when, en route, we considered taking the turn for Donaueschingen instead. It's now 12 days since we left that town, but today we found ourselves passing 9km to the south of it, so it would have been an easy option to return there for the free Stellplatz, a smoke-free bar to watch the match, and a known route for me to run tomorrow morning. On reflection, maybe that would have been the wisest choice.

Two road closures were encountered on our way here (one with a well signed diversion, one without), and it was the second one that was later to cause a bit of an annoyance.

We had parked up in the Stellplatz and walked to the town, only to find that the closure of the town's main street was for an art festival. Specifically, a pavement art festival. Entry was €4 a head, which wasn't unreasonable if your purpose was to soak up the atmosphere of the festival and enjoy all of the pavement art, but €4 each was unreasonable when your purpose was simply to visit one of the businesses along that street. Harrumph!

We managed to obtain entry without paying and as it happens the only place we found for the football was outside of the payable zone. Everywhere within the zone was focussing on music today, not on having their TVs on. I imagine that would have been different had Germany been playing...

Relieved to have found a football viewing location, it looked for a while like we were going to get away relatively smoke-free, when there was just us and the (smoking) bar man in the place. Then it started to fill up, and I'm coming to the conclusion that the only people who go to bars in this region are smokers. At least this place had ceiling fans and an open window, so it could have been worse. Of course, it was worth it for being able to witness England progress to the semi-finals of a World Cup for the first time in a while.

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