At 9:15am we were all packed up and driving out of the Detwang campsite. We joined the motorway heading south……south ?!!! Aren’t we heading in the general direction of Calais? No Rodney fancied checking out Schwäbisch Hall, before aiming for Heidelberg. Schwäbisch Hall turned out to be an unusual town; a mix of mediaeval, baroque and modern, set in a muddle of narrow roads and broad market squares beside the Kocher River.
We sat at a café in the Marktplatz and watched, what seemed to be, rehearsals for a play by a youth theatre group. Their stage was the 53 steep steps of the St Michael’s Church and they spent a lot of time walking, dancing and singing, up and down the steps; they’ll certainly be fit by the end of it. We then wandered through some wonderfully old streets, down to the river and out on to the Unterwöhrd, an island in the middle of the river with lovely views of the town above.
A couple of hours later we drove back to the A6 and headed west; now we’re driving in the right direction. We cruised along discussing how Germany seems to be covered in solar panels, far more than anywhere else we’ve been in the world. And we tried to work out how long it would take us to get to the next planned campsite in Eberbach, but whatever time we came up with, didn’t really matter. Two junctions along on the motorway, the slow lane became a car park, so as soon as we could get out into the second lane we did. Cruising along with the cars we actually passed at least 3 kms of almost completely stationery trucks in the slow lane; it was an amazing sight. At one point the trucks covered two lanes, then, just as we reached the next junction, all the cars, all three lanes, everything, came to a complete stop. A quick decision was made and we managed to squeeze between the trucks to make our exit off the motorway at junction 39. We later heard on the radio that there was a 26 kilometre tailback on the motorway near Neckarsulm; we were very glad we made the decision to take the cross country route.
We drove through a couple of villages and then pulled up under a nice tree at the end of a farm track to eat our lunch. Halfway through eating, an old farmer walked over to us from the field across the road. We were concerned that he may not like us being parked there, but it turned out he just fancied a chat and obviously wanted a peek inside Eileen. So with our lack of German and his not knowing any English since school, that much we understood, we somehow muddled through and told him which countries we had been to and where we were going next. We told him the date that we had left England and that we only had eight days left and after smiles and “Auf Wiedersehns” all round, I felt quite pleased that we really seemed to have just had a conversation, without relying on the other person to speak English.
The route we took was rather circuitous, but we passed so many pretty villages and Möckmühl, with its fortress wall and turrets, looked interesting but we needed to get to a campsite before too late, as the last few we have stayed at have been very full. We followed rivers, crossed rivers, passed meadows full of flowers and fields full of barley or wheat, sunflowers, cabbages, sweetcorn and lots of apple orchards too. In places the countryside was a patchwork of colours, fields of yellow, next to fields of purple, gold and every shade of green; it was a nice drive but rather a big detour.
We finally reached Mosbach and joined the main road heading north beside the Neckar River and stopped at Camping Eberbach, in, wait for it, Eberbach. The campsite is right beside the river and we’ve seen some quite large barges and pleasure boats travelling up it towards Heidelberg. The weather is still sunny and warm, so we’ve eaten dinner outside and will aim for an early night so that we can get up fairly early and walk over to the station to catch a train in to Heidelberg tomorrow. We’re not going to chance trying to get in to, and park, in any more cities with Eileen. Plus, vehicles have to have an emissions certificate before they can enter the city and we don’t have the time to go and organise one of those with a local garage, so it’s the train for us.
