Where's Bertie? He's still in the Stellplatz at Donauwörth.
Weather: Sunny with just the odd bit of cloud floating about. Cool start but climbing to low twenties by afternoon.
As is often the case when we arrive in a new place, we had no idea what this town would have to offer, but a quick walk around last evening told us that it was a visually attractive old walled town worthy of a closer look.
Thus we started today at the Tourist Office where a whole array of leaflets was on display in their foyer. I duly picked up the 'about Donauwörth, including town map' one, which had a little information in English, but it was the most uninformative Tourist Information leaflet we've found to date. On the one hand they had such an array of leaflets on offer that I couldn't believe they were holding the most useful ones back, but on the other hand I couldn't believe they weren't telling anyone anything about their town (admittedly they do advertise a downloadable audiotour, but it's only available in German), so I nipped into the office and enquired. A bit of furtling around in a drawer on the part of the assistant, and I came away with a top-quality self-guided walking tour leaflet.
There are cities where we've struggled to be interested after an hour of walking around. Today in the small town of Donauwörth we managed to be entertained for the best part of three and a half hours, with just one pause for sustenance:
We agreed to go sharesies, which was fortunate on my part as Mick's peach sponge cake was definitely the winner out of this pair.
I'd had in mind a walk along the river this afternoon, but I got sidetracked looking at places we might want to visit over the next couple of weeks, which took a surprisingly long time. Mick always has the problem when entering a car park with lots of spaces that he can't decide which one to use. My problem is that faced with all the possible places we could visit in a very small area of Germany I want to go to them all. I did manage, at length, to narrow it down to a number that we can fit into the time available.
The afternoon riverside walk thus got condensed into a quick 40-minute pre-tea leg-stretch. A blue sky, gently flowing water, green river banks, a grassy track and an almost complete lack of people - lovely!
Some snaps of the day:
Town walls
Built in the 16th century, this isn't one of the oldest buildings in the town, but half-timbered houses are always eye-catching, aren't they?
Looking along the main street (Reichsstraße), lined with grand buildings (mostly rebuilt after a catastrophic bombing raid in 1945).
If you look closely you'll see a man on a cherry-picker putting up a light-up emergency exit sign over the main street. It was one of a series we saw being erected, which we would have thought decidedly odd if we didn't know that the town is hosting a festival in this street next week.
In such an unrugged area, this is a notable lump of rock in the town. There was a fortress atop it in the 10th century.
We only visited two churches today. This one, at the old monastery was exactly as I expected it to be - full of bling and outlandishly ornate.
They like their blinged-up skeletons hereabouts. There were two on display in this church.
An area of lawn was removed from here last year to make way for this area of wild-flowers edged by beds containing a huge array of herbs. With a significant amount of each, we were unsure whether they were there for the locals to help themselves, or whether they were just for show.
This would have been fountain of the day...
...if I hadn't preferred this one.
Weather: Sunny with just the odd bit of cloud floating about. Cool start but climbing to low twenties by afternoon.
As is often the case when we arrive in a new place, we had no idea what this town would have to offer, but a quick walk around last evening told us that it was a visually attractive old walled town worthy of a closer look.
Thus we started today at the Tourist Office where a whole array of leaflets was on display in their foyer. I duly picked up the 'about Donauwörth, including town map' one, which had a little information in English, but it was the most uninformative Tourist Information leaflet we've found to date. On the one hand they had such an array of leaflets on offer that I couldn't believe they were holding the most useful ones back, but on the other hand I couldn't believe they weren't telling anyone anything about their town (admittedly they do advertise a downloadable audiotour, but it's only available in German), so I nipped into the office and enquired. A bit of furtling around in a drawer on the part of the assistant, and I came away with a top-quality self-guided walking tour leaflet.
There are cities where we've struggled to be interested after an hour of walking around. Today in the small town of Donauwörth we managed to be entertained for the best part of three and a half hours, with just one pause for sustenance:
I'd had in mind a walk along the river this afternoon, but I got sidetracked looking at places we might want to visit over the next couple of weeks, which took a surprisingly long time. Mick always has the problem when entering a car park with lots of spaces that he can't decide which one to use. My problem is that faced with all the possible places we could visit in a very small area of Germany I want to go to them all. I did manage, at length, to narrow it down to a number that we can fit into the time available.
The afternoon riverside walk thus got condensed into a quick 40-minute pre-tea leg-stretch. A blue sky, gently flowing water, green river banks, a grassy track and an almost complete lack of people - lovely!
Some snaps of the day:
I see your photos have shrunk back to normal size .. I was rather enjoying the immense ones though :-)
ReplyDeleteI'm still seeing massive snaps where they are landscape orientation and normal size (although they look tiny!) when they're portrait. I've tried to fix the problem but without any success. Maybe once I'm home and have a laptop, rather than just a phone, I'll be able to find the errant setting.
Delete