Monday 12 August 2019

Monday 12 August - Heilbronn

Where's Bertie? He's still in the Stellplatz at Heilbronn.
Weather: Sunny start leading to an overcast morning, but clearing a bit for sunny intervals this afternoon. Feeling cool this morning (20 degrees max).

As we walked into Heilbronn this morning I was lacking in both energy and enthusiasm. I thus stated my objectives for our time in the town as being: to find the tourist office and obtain some information about the place; to take that information to a cafe/bakery where we would have coffee and nussschnecken; to read that information in leiu of walking around the sights.

We fulfilled the first two of those objectives, and in doing so not only did I liven up, but we also gleaned from the leaflets that there is so little to see in Heilbronn that it wouldn't take much effort to seek out those things we hadn't already passed on our way to the tourist office.

These are some things that caught our eyes:

The Sparkasse bank has legitimised the 'locks on bridges' thing by providing dedicated frameworks for the purpose at one end of a town bridge.

People have taken advantage of this in droves. The framework on the other side of the bridge was equally popular.

There are few historic buildings in the town. The air raid of 4 December 1944 contributed to this. We saw photos of how little of this church was left after that night

The Rathaus either survived or was rebuilt too

Most of the town was a mish-mash of post-war styles, with no two buildings matching. Here's just a little snapshot, taken from outside the church.

Back to the attractive stuff with an interesting representation of St Christopher.

And the park next to the Stellplatz is rather nice too. It put me in mind of an English park far more than the Englischer Gartens at Munich and Neuburg

Fountain of the day. In case it's not clear: on the left there's a cello spouting water, on the right the brass section is doing the same, in the foreground there are some bagpipes...

...then in the background (seen better from this angle) there is a figure that looks like it's come out of a Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones battle scene.

A couple of fast-food wurst-and-chips sorts of places in town nearly enticed us to lunch, but we'd not long eaten our enormous pastries in a cafe in the square. With nothing else to hold us in the town, we returned to Bertie for a while, before taking a walk in the opposite direction along the river this afternoon. Having been spoilt by the lovely riverside surroundings in Besigheim yesterday, this afternoon's jaunt was comparatively uninteesting. Time to move on tomorrow!

Heilbronn has six twins (including Stockport, which is 923km from here, apparently). ^^If one has six twins are they actually septuplets? Probably not as the other six are likely not related to each other.^^

2 comments:

  1. That's a bit of a contrast to the meagre twelve padlocks I photographed recently on the Millennium Bridge in Lancaster. By then I had been enlightened (by you if I remember correctly) about this bizarre practice after finding a single one on the trigpoint at Brown Rigg Moss - NY 949 166 - 419m. See my post:

    http://conradwalks.blogspot.com/2019/07/trig-points-os-sheet-91-shacklesborough.html

    There are only four of those little metal hoops embedded in the concrete of trigs so competition for additions would likely be fierce if the idea catches on and it may result in aficionados carrying a portable sngle grinder.

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    1. It was indeed me who enlightened you. I have seen bridges so thoroughly covered in locks that people have started attaching their lock to a previously-attached one in a daisy-chain fashion. I'm now picturing trig points wearing 'dresses' made out of padlocks. (I doubt that would happen because I reckon the sort of person most predisposed to indulging in this ridiculousness would find it too much effort to get to a trig point when bridges are so much more easily accessed - and have a convenient watercourse below for the disposal of the key).

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