Rain is definitely made of wet stuff
Mid-morning, we left Austria and drove into Liechtenstein, another small principality tucked into a tiny corner of Europe. There were no guards on duty at the border controls, maybe they don’t work on Sundays, so we drove straight in.
It rains there too and while we were in Liechtenstein, it didn’t stop. Mind you we didn’t need long there, it’s a tiny country. We stopped in Vaduz, the capital, and strolled through to the main street looking for……well we weren’t really sure what to expect. There were a few museums and art galleries, quite a few banks and some nice sculptures. It’s a very modern place and most of the buildings in the whole principality don’t look much older than thirty and there’s still a lot of construction going on.
We popped in to the Postmuseum and enjoyed looking at all the old postage stamp designs. Then we walked to the far end of Vaduz to Mitteldorf, the older part of the capital; about a five-minute walk. The castle looked gloomy sitting amongst the trees on a ridge above the ‘city’ and it can’t be visited because Prince Hans-Adam II and Princess Marie actually live in their castle; as they should.
Vaduz Castle
We drove to the southern end of Liechtenstein, crossed the Rhine and drove north along the border, back to the northern end and onwards. A whole country in one morning! That has to be another first for us; San Marino and Monaco took us far longer.
We were now in Switzerland and when we reached Guttingen on the shores of Bodensee a.k.a Lake Constance, we pulled up next to a marina and enjoyed a pommy picnic lunch in the rain. We followed the road through Kreuzlingen and along the edge of Untersee, finally crossing the Rhine again to Stein am Rhein, which turned out to still be in Switzerland, though just outside town we crossed the border into Germany. Gosh that’s four countries in one day; exhausting!
Time to find a campsite, and when we checked into Campingplatz Horn Bodensee in Gaienhofen, the rain actually stopped for the first time all day. The sun didn’t exactly come out, but the sky looked a bit happier.
