Bamberg where things get rococco

We actually met several Peters at Rothenburg flying club.  One of who you've heard about already, one of whom makes a cow auto-scratcher, and the other is always up for a good time.  With the latter we went to the small local Oktoberfest the night after we arrived, which was excellent fun, I schwenkte, there were dirndl's and lederhosen (also on women) galore, and everything was perfect except for us having forgotten our camera.  Given that bier was sold in 1L quantities at 8% alcohol I was regretfully obliged to drink radler (shandy, i.e. mixed with lemonade), which was schade, as the beer really did have a good flavour.  We also went on an awesomely awesome upside down and round about ride.  Annnnnyway.  This Oktoberfest Peter suggested we go to Bamberg.

A nice castle we flew over.

All nice towns seem to be on rivers, Bamberg is no exception.

Bamberg's beautiful cathedral

Bamberg was I have to say pretty awesome.  I'm sad that I couldn't buy a Krug (or stein, anyway stoneware bier receptacle), because we don't have the space / weight / we're on a budget, but we had a good time trying some of those wacky biers (smoked bier anyone - it's a local specialty) and looking at those most festive buildings.

Public art is always fun

Renate and Julian with their smoked beers just out of sight

Peter & Renate's CTLS, nice little plane!

It was a fun day out and definitely to be recommended.

Rothenburg odT tourist magnet extraordinaire

Many people agree that Rothenburg odT is a pretty special place with its entire medieval city walls and half timbered houses: Japanese tourists; myself; Hitler.  So given that it has a little airfield owned by the aeroclub that is 3.6km from town I really had to take Julian there to see it.

My prior knowledge of how Rothenburg tour busses operate meant that the first thing we did after tying down and putting up our tent was to go into town (at about 6pm) and have a look at it in the magical hour and a half when the tourists had gone but there was still light.

Nice gate

So pretty, I think because the old town is so large and so homogenous in style.

The next morning I woke up and my foot wouldn't fit in my shoe.  Too much bike riding you say?

He was very cute, normally I would have liked to keep him, but...  I think he was feeling it too, as he was surprisingly difficult to get rid of, each time Julian (I didn't want him to run into the tent) shook him down into the heel he scurried straight back up into the toe.

We went back into town to see what 'where everyday is Christmas' (Kathe Wohlfahrt stores) is really like in the daylight.

much better at night, right?

There were heaps of fantastic apple & pear trees on the way to Rothenburg

oops

Of course we couldn't continue being so lucky with the weather in late September, so the following morning it was still drizzling when we finally dared venture outside the tent at 10am.  We wandered over to the showers, me in my thongs (flip-flops for you English people!), to be met by a most concerned gentleman, 'Das kann ich nicht mit ansehen dass Sie bei diesem Wetter zelten, Sie mussen zu mir nach Hause kommen' (rough translation - I can't watch you tent in this weather, you have to come stay with me), my motto for this trip has been to say 'yes' to anything offered and make more friends and learn more about different cultures, so I of course said 'YES, that would be lovely'.  Which is how we ended up staying with the most lovely Dr Peter Bittner for a couple of days.

Singin' in the rain at Langenburg, home of the famous Wibele (tiny meringue like thingies, mmmmm yum)

 Peter took us to see many pretty local towns and the little things that are what make an area really nice, that only residents know about.  (Local pubs, crypts, Jugendstil churches and of course cake shops - he seems to have got my measure very quickly)

Julian & Peter in his kitchen

Really nice internal door handles, I wonder if I could make such things myself with a little blacksmithing course?

This is a really fabulous art installation in a castle that is now a retirement home / artists colony - you let ball bearings run through the nails creating music.

We of course had to experience the local brewery

One thing I particularly liked about this crypt was the different tops on the columns (not so many to be seen in this picutre)

The route to Rothenburg-ob-der Tauber: medieval fortified towns and castles

And we're off - the zeppelin over Friedrichshafen, the nearest airfield to Konstanz

After a lovely catch up with Bill and Gisi it was time to continue on.  Hmmm where to?  We were running low on time so Aachen had to be struck off the list, we had a look at going to Rheinfelden but they weren't open on a Tuesday, so we ended up deciding on a South-Western round flight: Rothenburg odT via Mannheim to the Mosel down to Rheinfelden (near Basel) then off to France.

But first a fly by of mad Ludwig's stroke of genius that bankrupted him and lead to his deposition as king of Bavaria - how could a bankrupt be head of state, before now becoming number 1 tourist attraction in Germany....  Considering that there are up to 10 000 visitors per day in June - August I think we were best seeing it from the air.

Yes it's Schloss Neuschwanstein

Depending on who you speak to I've heard mutterings about 'tasteless baroque interior', and I've got to be honest, isn't it a bit odd to be building a castle like this in 1870 when you've already got several perfectly good castles right next door that are authentic????

What's wrong with this castle (in Fuessen)?

We did hope to land in Fuessen, once we saw what a pretty little place it is, located in the foothills,so I called blind on the radio in German to ask if we could land (there were 3 gliders circling, so we figured there'd be someone on frequency).  To which I received a somewhat testy reply that there were 3 airfields on that frequency, which one did I want to land at......  Unfortunately after much discussion it turned out we were too heavy to be allowed to land there so on we went.  Foiled again by the German rules.

So the next question was where to get cheap mogas (98 octane car petrol).  Luckily Plasticpilot had printed us out a map of all the German airfields with mogas marked on it, so with a bit of an effort we managed to localise ourselves on it and start calling the appropriate airfields to see if they were open.

We finally found Aalen, which was really quite busy.  Apart from being obsessed with old open gliders, I'm also obsessed with rocket ship style canards, so I was really pleased to find this one also fuelling.

This is called a Speed Canard, it's a German factory built plane.  About 50 were made: they're fast and fuel efficient.  I want one.

 We then went for an overhead look at Dinkelsbuehl, a neighbouring town of similar beauty before continuing on to land at Rothenburg.

Medieval churches and city walls next to nice half timbered houses.  Unfortunately the weather was a bit bumpy so these two shots are the best I could do

Swiss alps from the air

I have to admit that I wasn't too fussed about seeing the Swiss alps, as we'd seen Norway, it'd scared the #*!% out of me, and frankly what could beat Norway for otherworldly otherness?  But the weather was so good......  One of Gisi's neighbours is a SwissAir captain and she agreed that the clear air was a rare phenomenon.  So we rudely disappeared overnight.  Our plane's wing tanks are long and shallow, this means that it is very hard to judge how much petrol we have in the tanks, so we made a precautionary landing in Grenchen and decided to stay for the night.

We managed to leave our camera batteries charging at Kerstin's when we left, which meant that we were left with the small and the video cameras (also without much battery life), so apologies for the quality of the images.  I really like glaciers so there are a few nice images below.  More images are on Julian's blog.

Now since according to Wikipedia the glaciers on the Swiss alps take up 1230km2, you'll have to excuse me for giving you a couple more glacier pix.....

Looks almost like a road, doesn't it???

In order to get over the alps, we had to fly pretty high, in fact there were clouds below us....

This was the highest we've ever flown: 12 300 feet (3750m), the altitude didn't really agree with Julian so luckily we only spent 30mins that high.

It was a pretty spectacular day's flying.  We stopped for a break in Lugano, only to discover that the town itself was on the other side of a mountain range only to be reached via a bus then a train, so we'll save Lugano for a future trip.

Airfield review Salzgitter Schaeferstuehl EDVJ

This is a cute little airfield with a lot of activity.   When we landed gliders were out and about, others were preparing to be winched and there were a lot of parasenders preparing to jump off the hill.

It's a nice well tended little 950m grass runway.  Despite a whole heap of people being around everyone kept very much to themselves, so it took us a while to work out where to pay our landing fee (€6) before the short walk into town (about 2km).  It's a pretty little town, very quiet on a Sunday, with about 5 gelati shops.



http://www.lsg-schaeferstuhl.de/Home.htm

Airfield review Hannover Updated and downgraded

`We wanted to go into Hildesheim,quite a long way out of Hannover as part of our avoid large airports, avoid large fees plan.   But they were having racing on their airfield that weekend so we couldn't land there and Hannover.

Landing on the shorter (app 1.3km) runway

So we went into Hannover airfield and Kerstin picked us up.  Which was most convenient.  Hannover hosted the World Expo in 2000, which means that the airfield is well connected to the town by a train that goes to the main terminal and takes about 20 mins to get to the main rail station at a cost of €4.20 per single.

For the size of the airport, landing wasn't expensive at €10 and some change, with our total bill for 2 landings and 3 nights parking outside being €48.  Parking in the hangar is in the €50-60 per night range.  We were chauffeured around by a follow me bus.  And everyone was really, really, nice.

Then we got the bill in the post.  Apparently we were meant to be charged for take-offs as well as landings.  In and of itself no problem, but it's a lot easier if they charge us at the time, as it was the bill went to an English friend's place and they had to then email us all the details and then we had to organise to pay out of Australia with the most inconvenient time lapse.  Really such a pain and has left me with less than charitable feelings towards the German bureaucracy that occasionally frustrates us all.

And they put us on the arrivals board!!!!  (GCGOL)

Hannover: Friendliness 10/10
Value 1/10  I hate thinking I've paid for something then getting a bill in the post 'oh by the way we forgot to charge you, pity that paying on the spot is more convenient for you and therefore you usually do it that way!'
Location 7/10

No restaurant at the GA terminal, but lots of cafes for punters in the terminal.  This is not a place you would camp, but if you're interested in going to Hannover it is convenient place to stop with good rail connections to town from the main terminal which is a fair foot march away.

Copenhagen catch up

I had a couple more photos of Copenhagen that I really wanted to share, but just couldn't find.....  Of course, they were mixed in with Switzerland!

Handbag: nice or nasty?

Awww isn't he cute?

Ta daa!  Eva laughed herself sick that I'd thought her coffee warmer was her handbag....

Bodensee (Lake Constance) from the air with uncle Bill

The Colossus of.... Lake Constance???

You may have heard me talk about my Uncle Bill.  He's 78 and met my Aunt Gisi when he was 70, after both of them had lost their partners.  Neither of them was looking for a new partner, he was happy travelling and she was happy at home in Konstanz: now they're living happily ever after travelling the world and splitting their time between Melbourne and Switzerland.  They're also thinking of taking a bicycle tour along the Danube (a support bus takes your luggage for you).  Zwei haben sich gefunden.  I hope that I'm as happy and active as them when I'm their age.

The three of us underway

Uncle Bill has had a hip replacement and is currently staving off a second.  As you know our plane is not massive, but a little thing like that isn't going to stop an adventurer like him.  So we went for a tour of the lake.

The Rhine canal

And going inland, pretty isn't it?

Lindau in Austria is on the Eastern corner of Lake Constance and being a pretty little island with a middle-ages city centre attached by a strip of road to the mainland it is a real tourist attraction.

Overview of the island and its harbours

view from the direction of the mainand

one of the towers, look at all the tourists in mid September!

Gisi's house, very top centre, it is incredibly difficult to identify a house from above, no matter how well you know it.

Konstanz waterfront, with tourist boat.

Church in the centre of Konstanz

On the way back to Bill & Gisi's, we went to Gottlieben, where Gisi lived for many years and just so charming and beautiful that it is absolutely packed with tourists in the season.

beautiful half timbered inn

And a gratuitous shot of the Friedrichshafen blimp flying past as we get ready for takeoff