Saturday 10 August - Besigheim

Where's Bertie? He's at a Stellplatz in the town of Besigheim. It costs €7.50 per day to stay here. Water and electricity are available at extra cost. (Exact location: 48.99768, 9.14829)
Weather: Grey start, after a rainy night, with a couple of light showers, but clearing throughout the day to give hot sunshine.

By half past seven this morning we were breakfasted and walking around the lake at Schlosspark Monrepos, in the hope that the gentle exercise would loosen up Mick's back (which has been improving all week) enough to allow him to take part in this morning's parkrun. It did and he did - at a faster pace than the 'gentle trot' he had expressed as his intention*.

As with the last couple of weeks, there were faces we recognised from last year's visits to Stuttgart (Monrepos parkrun didn't exist a year ago but its close enough to Stuttgart to have attracted some regulars to change venue). We caught up with them as well as chatting with new people over an extended post-run coffee. It was noon by the time we dragged ourselves away.

The cake all looked so good that it made it difficult to choose two varieties to take away for later. Nothing here gives a sense of scale, but they were big portions.

Besigheim hadn't been our intended destination, but Google had told me that it housed a Lidl that lay on our route to Lauffen am Neckar. By the time we parked in Lidl's car park, I'd spotted signs mentioning the half-timbered Straße and an 'historic old town' and we could see enough of the place in its elevated position above the valley to suggest it would be worth a closer look. On the basis that we've been to Lauffen before, we changed our plan and decided to stay.

Good call! What a lovely place for an afternoon amble. Signs were promising even as we huffed and puffed our way from the top of the steps that had led us towards the old town:

It got better when we entered a town gate and immediately started stumbling across tri-lingual (German/French/English) information signs on historic buildings. It was only when we found the market square...

The sun was in the wrong place to achieve a good snap. It was far nicer than this makes it look.

Thanks to Conrad here's a 'processed' version that has lightened the dark bits up nicely.

...that we found a 'town tour' leaflet outside the Rathaus and were able to put some structure to our wanderings. As a result we saw bits of the town (interesting bits!) that we almost certainly wouldn't have visited if left to our own devices.

View from the town wall. The steep valley sides here are lined with vineyards. From information gleaned on our tour, we know that viticulture has been going on here since at least the 1500s

It's not all pretty views. Looking in the opposite direction from the same spot, industry dominates the middle-distance.

Looking along the main street. Again, I fear the snap doesn't convey the loveliness of the scene seen by the naked eye.

I just love gems like this.

We finished our tour with a walk down to the river, to check out the route to reach the cycle path along which we'll be running tomorrow. By then the blue sky was setting off the water nicely:

Bonus snaps:

The means I used to descend from one of the sections of town wall. Then I went up and did it again, just because slides are so much fun.

The minigolf course next to which we are parked today is of the 'buy a metal course off the shelf and plonk it on concrete' sort. The chap just playing the hole on the far left of the snap gives scale to show the 'three paces long' size of the holes.

What a magnificent altar piece


^{(*Meanwhile, my recent birthday allowed me to run 14 seconds slower than my PB two weeks ago and still achieve the exact same age grading.)}