Kristian and Frances

Germany Day Two.

We leave Augsburg early at about 8:30am after a breakfast of crossaint and coffee. South into more rolling hills and greenery. No castles though, it's like the castles appear on the map only at time we're not in the vicinity. It's all a bit silly, because the romantic road is supposed to be a big tourist thing, but the sights along the road aren't signposted at all, so it's all a bit of guess work. We managed to find ourselves in a nice little town next to a lake, so we had a walk along the banks and saw families and swans and boats. We got back in the car and headed south again, managing to discover relatively little. Somewhere in the distance I spotted an array of radio telescopes, but no indication as to how to get to them, or if they were even available for visitation by anyone except aliens. Perhaps it was a NATO radar base.

The countryside is nice, always fresh and green. But eventually a little boring. In some ways there is a distinct lack of the unknown. Unlike Australia, or the USA, where there's always a creepy sense that you could go missing, swallowed up by the landscape.

We stopped at the town of Wilheim, which has a cute Old Town section, but nothing especially interesting. We ate honey and sub-par german bread next to a statue in the town square. A little kid came and sat next to us and ate ice-cream. It looked a lot tastier than our bread, that's for sure. Left the town and headed south again, and eventually ran into the Austrian/Deutsche/Swiss Alps (they are, of course, all the same Alps, but each country seems to want to declare it "theirs" in some sense, even if they only each have a portion). It got a little more interesting here. Somewhere along the way we stopped at an Audi and had a lunch of bread and antipasto (stuffed chilli's and marinated feta) in the carpark. Eventually We managed to find a castle, ruins in fact, exactly what we were after. Unfortunately they were about 600metres up a mountain side, hidden somewhere in haunted woods and defended by a moat of bears and fire breathing dragons. In the little village nearby I drove on the wrong side of the road momentaril (turning out of an intersection and thinking of how to get to the Information bay we just saw a sign for). These things happen, it happened in America once too. Once is usually enough to remind you.

Our destination today was Fussen, at the base of the alps and a bit of a tourist/resort town. The Youth Hostel was fortunately out of beds. It had a kind of scary Scouts / School Camp kind of feel to it. We went back to the previous town and asked at a few guesthouses, and wound up in this one, in an attic room (oh attic rooms!) for the cheap price of 40Euros for the both of us (the youth hostel wouldn't have been much cheaper, and possibly in a shared room, with freakish Youth Group types). Plus, this town in much smaller, and a hell of a lot nicer really. And it's got wonderful views of the two castles in the area. There is also a cablecar thing that will take us up to the top of the mountains in a terrifying way. I hate heights, but it looks like fun once you're at the top (some 1700metres). We've got a lot to do tomorrow, visit the castle, take a ride up the mountain, and cross over to the south eastern corner of Germany to stay in Freiburg for a couple of days. Frankie scores maximum points for utilising the phrase "Ein loaf of bread bitte" (K put me on the spot! - F), used when we procured dinner (a loaf of bread that was as heavy as a brick and thrice as large plus the remains of the anti-pasto, the olive oil the chillis and feta were soaking in having escaped out of the sealed plastic carton, out of the shopping back and onto the back seat of our hire car!).

A jumble of german and english got us the room for the night, since this place is more or less a family home with extra rooms converted to accomadate strangers, so there isn't a reception staff trained in thirty languages and a background in another fifty, it's quite nice though, the blankets all fluffy and snug like. It was a long day, and we managed to slow the pace down with a few stops, tomorrow will be hectic, then after that we'll spend a couple of days in Freiburg, giving us a chance to explore in a bit more depth.

This place is so country, the air smells of hay, after a horse has eaten and pooped it. Outside as I write a german band is playng "Sweet Home Alabama" it's very out of place. Imagine some Americans singing "Roll Out the Barrels" in Texas, the old time German Classic "Mein Freund".

How does it go again? That's right...

Mein Freudn ist ein gut freund
ja, herr freund ist gut fur mir
die frau fur mein freund ist ein gut freund,
ja, herr freund hast ein frau
ein frau das ist ein gut frau
ja, alle mein freund bist gut freund
sind sie ein gut freund fur mir?

Then there's the rollicking; "Ich Liebe haben ein bier mit Adolf"

ich liebe haben ein bier mit Adolf
ja, ich liebe haben ein bier mit Adolf
wir trinken im der stadt und...

Which reminds me, I had a dream the other night that I was working for Adolf Hitler as some kind of office clerk. He came to the office and asked me to make him a cup of coffee. I said I'd never made him a coffee before, so I can't be sure it'll be any good. But he was nice, and insisted. I asked him how he had it, and it was with one sugar and milk. I remember thinking that I'd spit in the coffee because Hitler was an asswipe. There was some strange termporal distortion going on, because I was in the present, yet he was (obviously) in the past. I understood this, but it didn't seem to be particularly disturbing. It's another dream I've had where I've served some kind of evil person, and plotted against them (I've had two dreams in the last few weeks where I've had to serve a mafia boss after I offended him some way (the most recent by mocking his son).