Where's Bertie? He's at the Stellplatz in Ulm (exact location: 48.40654, 10.00921).
Weather: Sunny intervals. A couple of light showers lasting less than a minute each.
The Stellplatz in Ulm, where we arrived just before 11 this morning, has little to recommend it save for being free, adjacent to some parkland (beyond which runs the Danube), and walking distance to the town (assuming you don't mind a 25 minute walk). As far as we have been able to find, there are no marked motorhome bays, so it's a free-for-all between cars and vans. That's not a problem on a weekend, but it's a bit litter-strewn and it's not the sort of place where you'd want to sit outside.
However, it serves our purposes, positionally, for the next couple of days, so we settled Bertie into a spot and, after elevenses and lunch, we took the longer route into town - along the river.
I didn't capture any of the Stand Up Paddleboarders, or the many people paddling downstream in blow-up dinghies.
The obvious sight-seeing starting point on arrival was the Minster (tallest spire in the world, apparently, at 161.5m), which, in common with many we've seen this year, is undergoing significant building works, with hoardings around part of it and scaffolding around the spire:
We didn't go up the spire. I don't fare well with spiral staircases and I thought the 750+ steps to get up this one would likely have me dizzy for the rest of the day.
A bit of aimless wandering then preceded a walk through the narrow streets of the Fischerviertel district, with its wonky half-timbered buildings:
No more land available to build your house? Well put it in the middle of the river then!
The building sticking out at the end of the row, on the left, is (per the Guiness Book of Records) the most crooked in the world.
Viewed from the other side. I've managed to make it look less wonky than reality here.
Yet more wonky buildings.
And, viewed from the top of the city wall, a wonky tower. The 2m lean occurred when its wooden foundations rotted. By this point I was getting the impression that whilst the wonky buildings are now a tourist attraction, they have only come about due to some really shoddy site choices and design!
Being a Saturday, it almost goes without saying that we encountered a wedding. The ornate building is the old town hall.
Our return to Bertie was the shorter route, through the streets, rather than back along the river, as I wanted to check out the laundrette that I intend to use on Monday morning. The surroundings were less pleasing than the riverside, although we were surprised at how many fancy buildings there were, even as we walked out into the suburbs.
(Just remembered, I need to quickly leap back to last night. We ate outside, what with it being in the mid-thirties inside, and just as I had served up, a middle-aged drunk woman, with limited English, decided she not only wanted to watch us eat, but to talk to us the whole time too. The problem was that she was making very little sense and we didn't want to encourage her. She was oblivious to the 'really, just leave us to eat in peace' vibes. Of course, if we had been at home we would have politely asked her to get out of our garden, but as we were sitting in a public place there was little we could do, other than either: a) be incredibly rude, go into Bertie and shut the door (and it'd have to be a far worse encounter to cause me to be that rude), or b) sit it out and hope she would go away. Eventually she did, as suddenly as she had arrived. I don't think we were the first in the Stellplatz to suffer her company; I wonder if she made any more sense when speaking in German?)
Weather: Sunny intervals. A couple of light showers lasting less than a minute each.
The Stellplatz in Ulm, where we arrived just before 11 this morning, has little to recommend it save for being free, adjacent to some parkland (beyond which runs the Danube), and walking distance to the town (assuming you don't mind a 25 minute walk). As far as we have been able to find, there are no marked motorhome bays, so it's a free-for-all between cars and vans. That's not a problem on a weekend, but it's a bit litter-strewn and it's not the sort of place where you'd want to sit outside.
However, it serves our purposes, positionally, for the next couple of days, so we settled Bertie into a spot and, after elevenses and lunch, we took the longer route into town - along the river.
I didn't capture any of the Stand Up Paddleboarders, or the many people paddling downstream in blow-up dinghies.
The obvious sight-seeing starting point on arrival was the Minster (tallest spire in the world, apparently, at 161.5m), which, in common with many we've seen this year, is undergoing significant building works, with hoardings around part of it and scaffolding around the spire:
We didn't go up the spire. I don't fare well with spiral staircases and I thought the 750+ steps to get up this one would likely have me dizzy for the rest of the day.
A bit of aimless wandering then preceded a walk through the narrow streets of the Fischerviertel district, with its wonky half-timbered buildings:
No more land available to build your house? Well put it in the middle of the river then!
The building sticking out at the end of the row, on the left, is (per the Guiness Book of Records) the most crooked in the world.
Viewed from the other side. I've managed to make it look less wonky than reality here.
Yet more wonky buildings.
And, viewed from the top of the city wall, a wonky tower. The 2m lean occurred when its wooden foundations rotted. By this point I was getting the impression that whilst the wonky buildings are now a tourist attraction, they have only come about due to some really shoddy site choices and design!
Being a Saturday, it almost goes without saying that we encountered a wedding. The ornate building is the old town hall.
Our return to Bertie was the shorter route, through the streets, rather than back along the river, as I wanted to check out the laundrette that I intend to use on Monday morning. The surroundings were less pleasing than the riverside, although we were surprised at how many fancy buildings there were, even as we walked out into the suburbs.
(Just remembered, I need to quickly leap back to last night. We ate outside, what with it being in the mid-thirties inside, and just as I had served up, a middle-aged drunk woman, with limited English, decided she not only wanted to watch us eat, but to talk to us the whole time too. The problem was that she was making very little sense and we didn't want to encourage her. She was oblivious to the 'really, just leave us to eat in peace' vibes. Of course, if we had been at home we would have politely asked her to get out of our garden, but as we were sitting in a public place there was little we could do, other than either: a) be incredibly rude, go into Bertie and shut the door (and it'd have to be a far worse encounter to cause me to be that rude), or b) sit it out and hope she would go away. Eventually she did, as suddenly as she had arrived. I don't think we were the first in the Stellplatz to suffer her company; I wonder if she made any more sense when speaking in German?)
No comments:
Post a Comment