Sunday 7 July - Sulzemoos

Where's Bertie? He's still at the Stellplatz at the motorhome dealer by Sulzemoos.
Weather: Some heavy thundery showers this morning, but dry this afternoon with sunny intervals. Feeling hot when the sun's out.

A quiet day today. With thundery showers forecast the whole day through, there seemed little point moving on when we were likely mainly to be indoors anyway - plus there's benefit in staying until tomorrow to talk to the workshop about the gas test.

The limitation of the location is that there's nothing of interest hereabouts.

Even so, I've managed to cover 7.5 miles on foot, as well as getting as far as the shaping of the neck on the jumper I'm currently knitting, and frittering away chunks of time on t'internet.

My first outing, whilst Mick was still in bed, was a run, taking in the village of Einbach. In view of the violence of the thunder storm that had struck in the night, combined with the forecast of more of the same, I decided to defer my long run for this week and instead try to squeeze in a short one between showers. I duly set out just as the drumming on Bertie's roof abated, when the sky in the weatherwards direction was looking bright. If I hadn't slowed down to look at a map every now and then, and if I hadn't lost the path in the woods, I would have made it back before the next shower (or, quite probably, run further), but as it went I got wet. At least the lightning held off.

Based on yesterday's recce, when I set out I'd intended to do an out-and-back on the cycle path adjacent to the road, but on the spur of the moment I peeled off on a track across crop fields and through the woods, to complete a loop. I saw lots of hare and one deer on my way.

After a few more showers, the day turned much brighter and warmer than forecast, although we could see heavy clouds to the south and hear thunder rumbling in that direction (glad we're not still in Munich!). We thus managed a couple more good-weather leg-stretches, taking in the village of Sulzemoos (I'm calling it a village, but it's possibly bigger than we appreciate, as its Rathaus is huge and modern).

I'm now going to go back to the knitting to see if I can get that neck finished before the end of the day.

Saturday 6 July - Munich and Sulzemoos

Where's Bertie? He's at a Stellplatz at der Freistaat - a huge motorhome/caravan dealer and accessories shop just outside of Sulzemoos, about 30km NW of Munich. It's free to stay here with free wifi. Water and electricity are available for a fee. (Exact location: 48.28180, 11.26021)
Weather: Sunny and hot until mid-afternoon when it clouded over and cooled down. Brief thunder storm at 1830ish, then clearing back to sunshine.

We went for a final walk around Westpark last night between 8 & 8.30pm, finding the grass littered with people picnicking, the beer garden full (with a band in session) and the open-air cinema just filling up for the night's showing. The picnickers and beer-gardeners must have left in dribs and drabs sometime after we returned to Bertie, but we didn't notice them. The cinema ended a little after midnight, but whilst I was woken by the chattering of people and slamming of doors, I soon tuned it out enough to doze on.

The real disturbance started at 2am, when a gang of yoofs (thankfully over the other side of the car park) thought they would demonstrate how big/hard/clever/something they were by being as falsely loud as they could*. On and on they went, until finally we heard the noise enter the park, go past us and slowly fade away. That was the cue for a car of boy racers to start doing circuits of the car park. Around and around, their booming music fading in and out, until I wondered out loud how long they could possibly go on before they grew bored. Eventually we got out of bed to watch. They were filming the dashboard as they drove, presumably recording their max speed, which, due to the shape and size of the car park, can't have been more than 40mph. All such things must come to an end, and they eventually parked up and disappeared off into the park too, but it took a good while to then settle back to sleep.

My head was thoroughly groggy when I dragged my sleep-deprived self (and slightly hay-fevery - must be a very high pollen count as I'm not overly sensitive to the stuff) out of bed as the alarm went off at 0640, for breakfast a clear 2 hours before running. If we hadn't loitered around in Munich for the best part of a week purely for the Westpark parkrun, I would undoubtedly have abandoned any thought of running and gone back to sleep.

The run was good and livened me up no end, but even better was seeing (and going for coffee with) some of the same people we'd met at the inaugural Riemer parkrun (on the other side of the city) last weekend. Travelling around as we do, it's rare to encounter the same people more than once.

There had been tentative thoughts of staying one more night in Munich, to visit the 'New' (as opposted to the 'Old' or the 'Modern') art gallery, as entry only costs €1 on a Sunday. The plan was scuppered when I checked the website and found the New closed at the end of 2018 for extensive works (reopening 2025?!). Some of its collection is going on display in the Old, but not for three weeks yet.

So, at lunchtime today, we made our final departure from the city and headed up the motorway to Sulzemoos. The main puposes of coming here were to use the service point and to enquire at the Hymer workshop about a routine gas test*. As it was beyond lunchtime, we thought we'd pause here for some food too.

By this time, Mick was feeling decidedly under the weather, so plans to move on were cancelled. Mick spent the afternoon resting (he's feeling much better now), whilst I took a look around the dealership. It's huge! It's like being at a motorhome show, but without having to pay an entrance fee and with free accommodation thrown in!

The excitement of the afternoon came late on, when we found ourselves in a race: thunderstorm vs al-fresco hair cuts. With credit having been left on our nearest electric hook-up point, I plugged us in, got the shears out and we started lopping the locks. We'd not long started on my hair when rumbles of thunder were heard. By the time I had the clippers on Mick, great flashes were around us and the thunder was crashing. They're not the most precise haircuts we've ever had, but we did finish and get indoors about 90 seconds before the rain came, going from nothing to drumming in the blink of an eye. Ten minutes later, it had passed, but we're apparently in for more of the same tomorrow.

^^(*1 Chatting to some parkrunners this morning they expressed surprise that we'd encountered such nocturnal disturbance. Germany has such strict noise rules that they said this sort of behaviour is rare.
*2 Gas test: We weren't able to enquire about appointment availability today as the bookings person doesn't work on Saturdays, but they did advise that the gas test is €60 or, under a current offer, free if we agree to an advertising decal being put on Bertie's rear. Hmmm. Would it be worth the saving to then have to go to the trouble of unadhering it when we get home, as I wouldn't want such a thing marring Bertie's back end in the long run? Perhaps more pertinent a question: are we going to hang around here until Monday to enquire about an appointment, or try to find somewhere else further along our route?)**

Friday 5 July - Munich

Where's Bertie? He's in a car park at Westpark, which is (perhaps unsurprisingly) on the west side of Munich. (Exact location: 48.12353, 11.50877)
Weather: Lightly overcast this morning, clearing to give wall-to-wall sunshine.

We had a quiet night in front of Schloss Nymphenburg and this morning relocated ourselves to the only car park I could find that serves Westpark. It's unfortunate for our purposes that it's on the very west edge of the park, as the reason we're here is for tomorrow's parkrun which is over on the east side. With the post-run coffee location also not being overly convenient from here, our outing this morning was a walk through the park, followed by a recce of the streets to scout out parking potential for tomorrow.

What we found was lots of blocks of flats with only pedestrian access, and all nearby roads rammed with parked vehicles. We did eventually find a couple of roads that looked promising, but the jury's out as to whether we will relocate or just walk from here.

The rest of our day has been one of pottering, including walking plenty of the paths through the park (my verdict: nice surroundings, but not as good as the Englischer Park). I didn't take snaps of the lakes, rose garden or the excellent kids' playground/waterpark, but here are the more striking landmarks:

The main pagoda in the Chinese Garden

Another shot of the Chinese Garden, looking out from the pagoda

The Thai Shrine. The Bhudda was carved out of the trunk of a single maple tree.

The Nepalese Pagoda

I suspect we are not in for a quiet night tonight. As the day has turned to evening, the car park has filled (then overflowed) around us, mainly with people toting blankets, chairs and/or picnic baskets. The park hosts a large beer garden, various designated BBQ areas and an open-air theatre/cinema (tonight's film, Bohemian Rhapsody, is sold out), so it's not surprising it's busy. For us that means there will be vehicles moving late into the night (can't complain, of course - if we chose to kip in public car parks, we can't gripe about other people using them too!).

Thursday 4 July - Munich

Where's Bertie? He's feeling a bit cheeky sitting right in front of Schloss Nymphenburg, in a position that's at the opposite end of the discretion scale from where we were parked earlier in the week at the Englischer Garten. (Exact location: 48.16016, 11.50563)
Weather: Not a cloud to be seen all day. Temperature up to the high twenties this afternoon.

One of the things I like so much about Germany is that anywhere that there's a body of water there will likely be a path running alongside it. Last night we were parked within a minute's walk of the River Amper, so this morning we took a bit of exercise southwards, along its west bank. It was a shame it lacked bridges, so we couldn't return along the opposite side.

All very pleasant, and set off nicely by that sky.

It was gone noon by the time we'd returned to Bertie, had elevenses and made our way (via a petrol station - diesel 125.9c/litre) to Schloss Nymphenburg on the west side of Munich. I knew from the map that the gardens here are vast (180ha, I've since been informed), but we had no idea, until we arrived, quite what a huge palace complex it is.

The intention this afternoon was just to take a walk around the gardens (good, but not a patch on Schloss Schwetzinger which we visited last year, but then these gardens are free), but once here I felt inclined to take a look inside as well (€6 a head just for the main palace; if I'd read our guidebook first, I probably would have gone for the ticket covering the museum and various buildings dotted around the gardens too).

It's not possible to fit the whole symmetrical complex of buildings into one snap. This is just a bit of it.

The main building, built as a summer palance, dating from the mid-1600s. King Ludwig II was born here and later died at the Starnberger See, where we were last week. We visited his most famous residence, Neuschwanstein in 2014.

Looking from the top of the exterior entrance steps to the palace's great hall, down the length of the 'canal' that runs through the grounds.

Looking from the far end of the main water feature, back the 0.85-mile back to the palace.

Just a small snapshot of the grandeur of the great hall

The publicly accessible bits of building only amount to 20 rooms on the first floor, but it was enough to give a taster, without danger of getting 'schlossed-out'. We would, perhaps, have got more from our visit if we had opted for the audioguide, but each room had a multi-lingual information panel, so we didn't go uninformed.

All in all, a good day of touristing today!

^{(Today's aside: Our Austrian neighbour from last night's Stellplatz popped by before he left this morning. Chatting ensued, during which he asked from where in GB we came. Our nearest town is a small place and even within England it's common for people not to know it, so when abroad we generally just go for 'north of Birmingham' - close enough in the grand scheme of things. Today we were taken aback by our neighbour saying that he used to be a primary school teacher and he once made a visit to a school in a town in England. Yep, that school was in our little town. Small world.)}

Wednesday 3 July - Fürstenfeldbruck

Where's Bertie? He's at a Stellplatz in Fürstenfeldbruck, about 25km to the west of Munich. It costs €5 per night to stay here. Electricity, water and waste are available for extra fees. (Exact location: 48.17309, 11.24340)
Weather: Varying between lightly overcast and clear sky, but feeling much cooler (mid-twenties, but low humidity).

I took my final run around the lovely Englischer Garten before we moved on this morning. It's deservedly a popular place to exercise and, having ventured over to the southern end of the park today (nearer to the city), at no point was I by myself.

Our need for groceries and a service point then forced us to move on, but the rest of the morning proved frustrating. There are only two formal motorhome Stellplatz serving Munich, one at a farm to the south, the other at the Allianz Arena to the north. The latter was nearer to us, and also had a service point we could use without a stay (€15 per night for nothing but a parking space in a location next to a busy road didn't appeal).

After 10km of driving out of our way to get there, we found that the Stellplatz is currently closed whilst it hosts a building site. A new temporary Stellplatz has been created a few kilometres away, but having driven around it, we could find no service point. That was a mighty inconvenience, as our next destination was the west side of Munich, where we wanted to remain until Saturday morning, but now we were going to be forced to take a much bigger detour to somewhere else.

The question was to where? I quickly re-programmed the SatNav to a free car park that was in the right direction and was adjacent to the motorway, thinking we could contemplate our options over elevenses. I hadn't looked at the map in detail, so didn't realise until too late that accessing that car park required us to drive past it then backtrack - another 10km of detouring. When we finally reached it we found a chap sitting on a plastic chair in the entrance claiming we needed to pay €2 to park. I have my suspicions as to whether that was a formal charge or someone trying it on, but we weren't in a position to argue, and nor was I paying €2 just to park for half an hour whilst we drank coffee and considered whether there was any other option than to drive the half-hour out to Fürstenfeldbruck. Having already done enough unnecessary kilometres for one morning, we cut our losses and headed over here.

My grumpiness didn't abate much when we got here. I knew that this Stellplatz costs €5 per night. What I didn't know was that they charge €2 to empty your toilet (almost always free elsewhere; very occasionally it's €1) and 50c per 10 litres of water (the norm is €1 per 100l; sometimes available 10c-worth at a time). That made this service point the most expensive we have ever come across. To make matters worse both parking and all services (including electricity) are paid on an honesty box system, so I feel like in paying the high service point prices, I'm subsidising all the people who choose not to pay at all (of which, I would wager, there are many). There's a lot to be said for the almost-universal German system of coin-operated service and electric points.

Enough grumpiness! We did a walking tour of the town this afternoon, hampered slightly by the tour leaflet, and the on-line audio descriptions, being in German, but assisted slightly by a hefty brochure (all literature free here) including information in English about most of the points of interest (albeit presented in a different order, requiring lots of flicking back and forth searching for the right bit of text).

The highlight was the church at the old monastery...

A relatively grand exterior...

...and another ridiculously opulent interior. No patch of ceiling and barely any wall had escaped decoration.

...but the rest of the tour was only mildly diverting, taking in sights such as the grain store...

...and the old town hall:

Whilst an inoffensive place, I didn't find the town visually interesting enough to put it into the 'worth a visit' category.

Tuesday 2 July - Munich

Where's Bertie? He's still in the parking area at the Englischer Garten in Munich.
Weather: Overcast start to the day, with the cloud breaking up as the morning went on, leaving us with sunny intervals. Still humid, but a much more comfortable temperature, in the mid-twenties.

A short, violent thunderstorm disturbed us at 4am. I then got slightly more disturbed by pondering again about our neighbour. The motorhome next to us had been sitting with all of its blinds closed and its rooflights wide open, with no sign of life, since we arrived here on Saturday evening. That had been relatively unremarkable until yesterday afternoon's rain.

We came up with lots of reasons as to why an expensive van would be left sitting unsecured and unwatertight. In amongst those theories was that the occupant(s) had gone to bed one night and died. Given that there were plenty of far less drastic explanations, we decided not to alert the authorities immediately. Then the rain started hammering at 4am and I couldn't help but think how wet the interior must be getting, whether there was a dead person inside or not.

It was thus a relief when Mick got up to make breakfast this morning, looked out of the window and announced that the windows were now shut. Soon afterwards the curtains were opened and the very-alive occupant drove away. Phew!

Our day then proceeded in a topsy-turvy manner. Usually I run first thing, before a proper breakfast, and if we're going to go out and about we do it either mid-morning or early afternoon. Today I didn't run until mid-morning (because it was cooler today, but, oooh, that humidity! It made my speed intervals session hard work). Lunch then got pushed back because we'd run out of drinking water and bread.

We pondered. We could go to the supermarket and then move on to somewhere nearer to this afternoon's point of interest. We could go to the supermarket then come back here. Either way, we would risk finding ourselves in a spot far less ideal than where we are now. Ordinarily, we wouldn't spend more than two or three nights in a location that's not specifically allocated for motorhome parking, but this is such a discreet place (and there's no pressure on space now the weekend is over), that we felt happy to stay here another night.

It finally occurred to me that the very reason for bringing the Brompton bicycle was for this very scenario - so that one of us could nip to a supermarket without needing to move Bertie. So that's what I did, opting for the shop that could be reached with the most through-park riding and the least on-road riding.

It's very rare for us to buy bottled water (tap water is fine by us), and it probably goes without saying that when we are forced to buy bottled, I get the cheapest there is (which in Germany means the 25c deposit on the bottle is more than the price of the water). It didn't for a moment occur to me today that the cheapest would be fizzy - something that only came to my attention when I opened the first bottle back at Bertie. If we want cups of tea, it looks like we'll be drinking out of Bertie's tank. And I wonder how fizzy works for cold-soaked porridge?

Today's sight-seeing excursion was based on a recommendation from a parkrunner last Saturday morning, who said we should go to the Olympiapark, not because it was the home of the 1972 Olympic Games, but because the Munich Summer Festival ('Tollwood' - comprising a craft and world-food market, combined with live music and concerts) is currently being held there. It doesn't kick off until 2pm during the week, and goes on until 1am, so putting our day further out of its usual kilter, we didn't set out from Bertie until 3.30pm and, as there's no convenient direct public transport link between here and there, we opted to save the fare and just walk the 2.75 miles each way.

Having found our way to and into the park, the obvious first port of call was the top of the Olympiaberg, to give us a high-level view of the place:

Looking down on the Olympic sports facilities.

That informed us as to where the festival ground was, and off we went.

It wasn't remotely crowded when we arrived, as shown in this snap. As we left it was getting a bit busier and as we walked away people were heading towards the site in droves and the buses were fit to burst.

The afternoon's street entertainment - a woman on top of a large ball and a man with a big puppet. Just a bit bizarre.

A couple of laps of the market were walked, during which neither of the live-music acts lured us in to watch, but we did get side-tracked by a curry vendor:

They were massive plates of food, so it was a waddle of retracing our steps along the city streets and across the park, back to Bertie, where I have plans to spend the whole of the rest of the day (all 1-hour of it!) sitting down.

As opposed to those other well-known types of ice...

Monday 1 July - Munich

Where's Bertie? He's still unmoved, in a car park at the Englischer Garten on the east side of Munich.
Weather: Gloriously sunny and hot morning, overcast afternoon with thunder rumbling and a bit of rain.

A 15-minute walk took us to the nearest underground station this morning, where we found the sole ticket machine to have crashed. We took the advice of a local: just get on the train and if an inspector came, she would explain. We got on the train and she promptly disappeared. Ten nervous minutes later, we exited the ticket-barrier-free station in the middle of town having had a free ride.

The rest of the morning was spent seeing the main city-centre sights, assisted by a city map which came low down on the scale of usefulness and value for money (it was only 50c from the Tourist Office, but it didn't tell us much and even the zoomed-in map wasn't user friendly).

The new town hall. This was the first building we saw as we exited the underground. The old town hall, a short distance away, was a plain building that, left to my own devices, I would have guessed to be the newer of the two.

I could only fit it into one snap by artificially bending it via the camera's panoramic function.

After an initial look around and a stop for coffee (ouch - city centre prices!) we dutifully joined the masses to listen to/watch the glockenspiel/moving statues do their thrice daily display half way up the tower of the new town hall:

A zoom shot of the bits that move

It was predictably underwhelming (although no doubt quite magical when the town hall was first built in the late 1800s), but still worth a 10-minute investment of our time, as we were in the area anyway. Some people found it worthy of a round of applause; personally, I've never understood the notion of applauding something mechanical (nor sunsets, but that's a different story).

A shot of part of the assembled crowd. Notice all those people staring at the screens of their phones, where they can't possibly have seen the detail, missing the reality of what was going on around them. I wonder how many of them will ever play the recording back more than once? (If not more than once, then surely they may just as well have watched it, rather than recording it?)

Within a couple of hours* we had seen most of the main sights within the very centre of city. Of course, we hadn't taken tours of any of the buildings and whilst there are a couple of museums that would have interested us, we weren't going to visit them today (in common with much of Europe, most museums here don't open on a Monday).

One of the courtyards within the palace (biggest city-centre palace in Europe, apparently). It must be quite a job to maintain the painted detail on all four vast facades.

The only thing left for us to do before we declared our sight-seeing excursion to be complete was to have lunch. Mick, who has been hankering after a Bratwürst meal out since we arrived in Germany was just as delighted with his meal as he looks in this snap:

When the bill came it turned out that he had been given a meal that was over twice the price as the one he ordered. Good job he enjoyed it!

After an incredibly hot and humid morning, the sun disappeared as we dined, the temperature became comfortable, the wind picked up, and the restaurant next door (but curiously not ours) prepared by hooking guttering onto the gaps between canopies covering the outdoor tables. By the time we were ready to leave, thunder was rumbling in the distance.

Our intention had been to walk back as it was only 4.5km, mostly through the Englischer Garten, which starts right in the city, opposite the palace. We waivered a little as to whether public transport would be a better idea, but if it did hammer down then I figured we would get wet in the 15-minute unprotected walk from the station anyway, so we may as well walk through the park.

Looking across a section of the park to some sort of folly on a rise in the ground.

There's lots of water running through this park

It rained most of the way, with the thunder getting progressively nearer with every flash, but it never poured down and with the combination of the trees protecting us and the temperature drying us almost as fast as we were getting wet, the waterproof jackets were able to remain unused.

As I type this it's just started raining properly and the temperature is lovely. I predict an early night tonight. Our general policy is not to go to bed until the temperature inside of Bertie has dropped below 30 degrees (because I'm not closing the door and side-windows until that has happened and I'm not going to bed with the door and side-windows open), which has meant some late nights recently. Today it was down to 25 degrees by 5pm. We may even have to use bedding for the first time in a while! Oooh, and I'll be able to knit, after a week of having palms too sweaty to do so!

Today's bonus photo:

Fountain of the day

<sup>(*Yep, 2 hours to see a city where most tourists manage to keep themselves occupied for days. I've long acknowledged that I'm no good at cities, although if you take Munich as a whole, rather than just considering the city centre, we are finding plenty to keep us entertained here. It's a pity that we'll be out of drinking water within 24-hours, as I reckon the Englischer Garten could keep our attention for another day yet.

Slightly random aside of the day: we escaped into the four-storey H&M store during the most oppressive heat of the morning, to cool down in the air-con. There Mick finally resolved a packing-omission with the purchase of a belt. I'm now allowed to carry the daypack which has, until now, been holding his trousers up when out and about!)</sup>