Tuesday 11 June - Saarlouis (Germany)

Where's Bertie? He's at a free Stellplatz in the town of Saarlouis (exact location: 49.32154, 6.74187).
Weather: A bit of sunshine early on, then increasingly overcast. At the point of typing, only a few drops of rain have fallen.

After running five laps of the lake at Neufchateau this morning, I joined Mick in his search for the measuring cup that we use for scooping our porridge oats each day. We'd re-purposed the item for yesterday's bailing out of Bertie's boot and it had gone missing, eventually to be located in the bike bag.

Over breakfast Mick asked what our destination was for today. "No idea!" came the reply. I was so busy sorting out blog posts and dealing with the water ingress yesterday that I'd not put any thought into the matter. Ten minutes later I'd consulted Park4Night, Google Maps, a road atlas and a map of German parkruns, had concluded that we didn't need to go very far today and had come up with two strong contenders for our night-stop. Running what I knew about these by Mick (not a lot: one's in a town and has services, one's by a river and a town but has no services), we opted for Saarlouis (the river/town/no services option).

It's a bonus that the most sensible toll-avoiding route to southern Germany goes through Luxembourg, as the price of fuel there is not only cheap, but is also set by the government, meaning there's no need to detour from the motorway to find a cheap station. For us the only slight fly in the ointment of filling at a motorway service station was that Bertie's LPG and Diesel filling points are on opposite sides of the vehicle and the layout of the station made it impractical to fill both. With no option to re-enter the station once we'd left, that meant that having filled up with LPG at the first services (LPG being the priority as it's not available at every outlet), we had to stop again later for Diesel. It actually worked out quite well: we bought Diesel a matter of metres away from the German border, thus getting the best value for money*.

Our stop at a supermarket a kilometre away from our end-point was an exercise in shopping when hungry. That was followed, within minutes of arriving at the Stellplatz, by a combined coffee/elevenses/three-course lunch.

I'd seen a sign on the drive into Saarlouis that referred to it as a fortified town and that's as much as we knew when we set out this afternoon for a look around. An information sign we found on our way in told us that it used to look like this:

We've been to similar walled towns before, and the remarkable thing about this one is that once you've passed through the German Gate...

 ...there is little indication of its historic and fortified status. It's a place that needs to be viewed from outside to be appreciated.

After a bit of aimless wandering Google told us the way to the Tourist Office and our visit became structured, following most of a walking tour detailed on a leaflet. We started with the Church of St. Louis, where I spent a while wondering whether I disliked the architecture for looking like a multistorey car park, or liked it for being so completely different from any church I'd seen before (and I've seen *a lot* of churches!). I came down on the side of 'like'.

All looks normal from outside. The frontage and spire date from 1880, when they were rebuilt following a fire.

The interior was constructed between 1965 and 1970. It is described thus: "a large crystalline-shaped concrete sculpture with a high ceiling and cave-like interior.

Stained glass windows by a local artist

We finished our tour with a round of the pleasant parkland, dotted with more evidence of past fortifications (and with views of an unfortunate number of ugly 1960s buildings), that lies between the original route of the River Saar (now effectively a cut-off ox-bow) and the re-routed course (moved for flood avoidance).

Our verdict: a place worthy of a visit and a good start to this summer's tour.

^{(*LPG was 43.9c per litre, Diesel 106.3c. I did have a sudden "What language?!?" panic when I unexpectedly had to go to pay at the LPG station (a drive-through booth where Mick found he couldn't reach the cash desk from his elevated position) which resulted in me accidentally using Spanish in Luxembourg. Full marks to the cashier for not batting an eyelid and for Mick not laughing too loudly behind me!)}