Tuesday 7 August 2018

Sunday 5 August - Binzwangen, Riedlingen and Anhausen

Where's Bertie? He's in a car park to the south of Anhausen (exact location: 48.28531, 9.50070).
Weather: Almost entirely wall-to-wall sunshine, hot and humid.

"To move or not to move" was the question we were still asking ourselves when I finished last night's blog post. Was the inconvenience of being kept awake by screeching tyres and music greater than the inconvenience of driving off somewhere, only to need to return tomorrow?

As it approached 9pm, we were leaning towards staying. Then yet another boy racer came haring through the car park at such a speed that any stray child would not have stood a chance. The needle suddenly swung right around to 'Go!'.

It was an incredibly good decision. We drove 12km to the car park of an open air museum to the north of Binzwagen (or 'Bin Wagon' in my head), which turned out to be in the middle of open countryside, on a quiet road - perfect for an undisturbed night. (Incidentally, had I known the nature of the museum in advance, we would have arrived earlier for a look around - missed an opportunity there (exact location: 48.0956, 9.40863).)

As we had gone to bed tonight, the plan for this morning was to drive back to Riedlingen first thing so that I could run the section of river from there. This morning's change of plan was that I ran straight from Bertie's door, reaching the river after a couple of miles, and reaching Riedlingen another 4 miles or so later. There I waved to Mick, who had put Bertie back in the spot we had occupied yesterday, and continued on along the river for another couple of miles before turning back. Of the ten miles run, about nine were in the sunshine, so by the time I was finished I was hot and bothered and my thighs were disgruntled at the effort. Solution: go and stand crotch-deep in the river for a while. It felt so good - even if I probably did look a bit odd.


Breakfast, showers and faffing around preceded me investing an hour in trying to sort out the problem of why Blogger was refusing to let me post with photos (for the last two days I've had to add the photos afterwards, via the Blogger dashboard, which is painful and something I only took the trouble to do because we had wifi). My final test post seemed to work, but we're sitting somewhere with no mobile phone signal tonight, so I'll not know whether this post will go until we leave here.

Eventually, via the Service Point which ate our Euro but refused to give us any water (the nearby public toilets gave me 5 litres for free, which will tide us over), we made a move, finally leaving the Danube for the last time on this trip.

Our journey to tonight's stop wasn't straightforward as the SatNav's route involved an 'Access Only' road and Google took us to the end of a dead-end vaguely near where we wanted to be, but short of driving through some farm buildings and wheeling Bertie off a cliff, it wasn't going to get us here. We happened upon the right route in the end and found that we had seriously mistimed our arrival, not having known in advance that this is a very popular riverside picnic spot, complete with lots of picnic tables, a children's play area and some barbecue pits. The car park was rammed, as were all of the nearby roads. Yet, we still managed to find somewhere to shoehorn Bertie (thanks to a German van moving over a little) and since then we have moved three more times - making like Goldilocks, albeit in our case waiting until a better spot was free before taking it and then repeating until we hit on somewhere relatively flat where we are not reversed into tree branches.

It's a lovely location. I'll take some pictures tomorrow (and, hopefully, Blogger will allow me to post them).

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