One inestimable benefit of Euro hotel hospitality is the delicious and generous buffet breakfast offered with the room. The hotel Bercher in Zuffenhausen, while lacking in some amenities we’d appreciate, like AC and speedy Wi-Fi, was no exception and we ate well before shoving off cross-town for our 4-hour allotment of Mercedes-Benz Museum visit.
The MB Museum is a monster with cars and displays on multiple floors
- an auto Guggenheim
While we worked our way there we passed directly by the prominent Wilhelma Zoo and Josh, not quite the motorhead Hank and I are, decided to spend his morning there Great! Everyone was happy, though Hank and I concur that while had not exhausted all the great, new museum had to offer, we got about all we could stand for a day.
My favorite MB - the 'Special Roadster '
(the name says it all)
The most famous tow truck in the world
Our overnight destination was at Landau, on the Bodensee (or Lake Constance for some) and we happily meandered through the very rich and bountiful farmland of western Bavaria on our way. The overwhelming impression it left was of how prosperous the Germans, or at least the rural, southern Germans are. The generously sized single-family homes were universally bright and tidy with carefully manicured grounds and usually a shiny new MB, BMW, or Opel in the driveway. The farms were large with arrow-tractors straight rows and worked by new looking – there seemed to no lack of Kapital!
A pretty morning in pretty Lindau
We had picked Lindau almost on a whim, knowing nothing about it other than it was the right distance from Stuttgart and set on a lake. But like so many of our seemingly capricious decision, the result was almost magical. Lindau is an ancient walled city on a small island in the lake and had evolved into a popular tourist destination. To our advantage, the season had not really cranked there yet, as our graciously helpful host at the gasthof explained. So we pretty much had the church courtyard to ourselves as we enjoyed local fish dishes and other Bavarian specialties al fresco. Over dinner we evaluated the next day’s mileage projection and decided we could afford to spend the morning exploring our end of the island.
The ferry from Austria
We were greeted by the same perfect weather we’d enjoyed almost daily from the start of our trip as we wondered the small marina, watching a sailing school go through their paces and marveling at the navigational skills of the ferry operators who could turn a 75 ft ship 180 degrees around in 100 feet, and generally enjoying a stress-free morning in a beautiful place.
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