Where's Bertie? He's in a free Stellplatz just outside of the town of Schorndorf. As usual, water and electricity are available for a small fee. Unusually, there's also a charge here (€1) for black/grey waste. (Exact location: 48.81662, 9.54132)
Weather: wall-to-wall sunshine and silly-hot until mid-afternoon, when clouds quickly developed and a delicious breeze picked up. A few rumbles of thunder, about 3 drops of rain then back to breezeless sunshine.
We had two key requirements for today's nightstop. The need to be within 45 minutes of Esslingen - to position ourselves for tomorrow morning - gave us lots of possibilities. The limiting factor was that it also needed to have a service point for us to use in the morning as we may be about to enter a period without easy access to one.
The new-this-year Stellplatz at Schorndorf fitted the bill. On the plus side, it was likely to be quiet (word won't yet have got around about its existence) but on the risk side, there were no reviews to give us an indication as to what to expect.
By our standards, it was a reasonably lengthy journey to get here (knocking on for 2 hours), but before we got started we had a couple of errands to run. The grocery shopping went fine (except the queue for the pfand (bottle deposit return) machine), but the LPG-filling exercise nearly defeated us.
We found the LPG pump without a problem, even though it was separate from the petrol/diesel forecourt, but such had been our concentration on its position that we'd failed to notice that there was no manned kiosk. The sole payment machine was also tucked away on that forecourt, so it confounded us for a while as to why the pump wouldn't reset to zero or dispense. We got there in the end, replenishing all of the gas we've used over the last six weeks - annoyingly at the highest price I've seen recently (although we're not talking big enough numbers to make it worth going out of our way to find somewhere cheaper).
After a fight with the SatNavs, to Schorndorf we came, via the shortest cross-country route. Would we have been better detouring to the motorway and going the long way around? It felt like it as we drove through 50km/hour limits every couple of kilometres and wound our way up and down hairpins bends, but some quick sums suggest there wasn't actually a lot in it time-wise.
So, Schorndorf! We knew nothing about the place (other than it was conveniently placed for our purposes) when we arrived, but when I went for a little look around our immediate area*, I saw a waymarker that made me suspect we may have accidentally hit another town on the Half-Timbered Road. Once I'd confirmed that was the case, we felt obliged to nip into town for a look around, although our initial plan was to leave that until this evening. We're 2km out of town here and the afternoon was silly-hot.
When it suddenly clouded over (temperature down; humidity up), our plan was brought forward and thus we got to admire the outstanding Market Square:
Standing in front of the Rathaus looking up the square.
Standing in front of the fountain looking back at the Rathaus.
We made no efforts to obtain any tourist information, being happy with just seeing the centre of the old town and walking back to Bertie via the Schloss - and via a cake shop that called our names as we passed.
Just a small indulgence
We were about two-thirds of the way back when the first rumbles of thunder were heard, but in the end neither that nor the next set of rumbles amounted to anything. In total I only felt three drops of rain. The breeze was nice whilst it lasted!
Fountain of the day
(*As well as having excellent cycling and walking infrastructure, we've noticed that Germany invests in quality sports facilities. The Stellplatz here is adjacent to (although not within sight of, thanks to lots of greenery) a sizeable 'sportspark', featuring an athletics stadium, tennis courts, a football pitch, a bmx park, outdoor gym facilities and lots of other stuff - all immaculately kept.)
Weather: wall-to-wall sunshine and silly-hot until mid-afternoon, when clouds quickly developed and a delicious breeze picked up. A few rumbles of thunder, about 3 drops of rain then back to breezeless sunshine.
We had two key requirements for today's nightstop. The need to be within 45 minutes of Esslingen - to position ourselves for tomorrow morning - gave us lots of possibilities. The limiting factor was that it also needed to have a service point for us to use in the morning as we may be about to enter a period without easy access to one.
The new-this-year Stellplatz at Schorndorf fitted the bill. On the plus side, it was likely to be quiet (word won't yet have got around about its existence) but on the risk side, there were no reviews to give us an indication as to what to expect.
By our standards, it was a reasonably lengthy journey to get here (knocking on for 2 hours), but before we got started we had a couple of errands to run. The grocery shopping went fine (except the queue for the pfand (bottle deposit return) machine), but the LPG-filling exercise nearly defeated us.
We found the LPG pump without a problem, even though it was separate from the petrol/diesel forecourt, but such had been our concentration on its position that we'd failed to notice that there was no manned kiosk. The sole payment machine was also tucked away on that forecourt, so it confounded us for a while as to why the pump wouldn't reset to zero or dispense. We got there in the end, replenishing all of the gas we've used over the last six weeks - annoyingly at the highest price I've seen recently (although we're not talking big enough numbers to make it worth going out of our way to find somewhere cheaper).
After a fight with the SatNavs, to Schorndorf we came, via the shortest cross-country route. Would we have been better detouring to the motorway and going the long way around? It felt like it as we drove through 50km/hour limits every couple of kilometres and wound our way up and down hairpins bends, but some quick sums suggest there wasn't actually a lot in it time-wise.
So, Schorndorf! We knew nothing about the place (other than it was conveniently placed for our purposes) when we arrived, but when I went for a little look around our immediate area*, I saw a waymarker that made me suspect we may have accidentally hit another town on the Half-Timbered Road. Once I'd confirmed that was the case, we felt obliged to nip into town for a look around, although our initial plan was to leave that until this evening. We're 2km out of town here and the afternoon was silly-hot.
When it suddenly clouded over (temperature down; humidity up), our plan was brought forward and thus we got to admire the outstanding Market Square:
We made no efforts to obtain any tourist information, being happy with just seeing the centre of the old town and walking back to Bertie via the Schloss - and via a cake shop that called our names as we passed.
We were about two-thirds of the way back when the first rumbles of thunder were heard, but in the end neither that nor the next set of rumbles amounted to anything. In total I only felt three drops of rain. The breeze was nice whilst it lasted!
Fountain of the day
(*As well as having excellent cycling and walking infrastructure, we've noticed that Germany invests in quality sports facilities. The Stellplatz here is adjacent to (although not within sight of, thanks to lots of greenery) a sizeable 'sportspark', featuring an athletics stadium, tennis courts, a football pitch, a bmx park, outdoor gym facilities and lots of other stuff - all immaculately kept.)
All that cake! No wonder you have to keep going for a run :-)
ReplyDeleteThose towns do look fantastic..
Running and walking: both useful for justifying the consumption of cake.
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