Germany

We left Holland on Thursday 22nd Sept & headed into Germany. We drove through the border without really noticing, there was no border control at all. The only difference was in the signs on the motorway. We started to notice that we were in Germany when we headed towards the Rhine Valley - the scenery was amazing. Masses of mountains and green trees. The river itself wasn't that great and was very dirty & busy with boats going down it all day. We stayed at a campsite up in the vineyards which surrounded the river. It was nice & quiet.

After a rest we took a walk down to the local town of Lorch, which turned out to be further than it had seemed. It was 8km up and down hills in the hot sun (It was still like summer in the Rhine Valley) and when we got to the town everything was shut for lunch between 1 and 3.30! not that there was that mcuh to see anyway. We left this campsite after 2 or 3 days and spent one night under a bridge by the side of the road which was very noisy. We stopped in a very touristy village called St Goar which had some castle ruins.

Next we moved on the Freiburg which Matthew told me was in the Black Forest. It turns out it was on the edge so we didn't get to see much of it whilst on that campsite. We got the bus to the town and it was ok. It had a nice church and lots of lovely shops but you get bored of looking round shops with no money quite quickly. After we left this site we saw more of the Black Forest whilst we started driving towards Schwangau.

We got to see more scenery than we expected though as one of our tyres had a blowout on the way. This turned into more of a problem that it should have been though as when we tried to put the spare on we discovered that the nuts for our normal wheels (which are mercedes alloys) did not fit the spare volkswagon wheel so we could not fix it on! We called our insurance company and they arranged rescue & said it would be approx an hour. After about 2 hours we called to check the progress & were told that they couldn't find us but they hadn't called to tell us this! I had a difficult conference call with the lady from CIS & a german lady who said they had been down the road we were on & couldn't see Scooby. I am not sure how as it isn't exactly hard to miss a camper with orange flowers down the side blocking one lane of a dual carriage way!

After several more conversations with the German office on the ADAC (RAC equivelant) the man arrived. He didn't speak a word of English & tried to put the tyre on before he realised the problem. He called his English speaking colleague who proceeded to argue with Matthew about whether or not I had said we were missing the nuts or not! The man went to get the nuts in the end & we were on our way after about 4 and a half hours & just before it got dark.

We didn't have time to get to our intended campsite so we stayed in one in Markdorf near Lake Constance. We had to stop there for 2 nights whilst waiting for a replacement tyre. The incident cost us about 60 pounds for a new tyre & 25 pounds on phone calls! We moved on to the next campsite in Schwangau near Fussen & the scenery there was amazing. We stayed at this campsite for a couple of nights. We went to Schloss Neuschwanstein which is the castle that Walt Disney based the Disneyland castle on apparantly!

We then walked from the castle to the top of the Tegelberg which is part of the Bavarian Alps & is 1700 metres high.

We got the cable car back down & then had to walk back to the campsite as there was no bus! We also went to an evening of traditional German music & comedy at the campsite but we couldn't understand a word of what was being said! We would have liked to have stayed in this area a lot longer as it was the nicest place so far but we had to move on to get to Munich before Oktoberfest ended!

By Chloe