Weather 28’C

Bit of a disappointing day today. After the success of yesterday with food, fashion and beautiful surrounds we thought we’d check out Lake Constance, the largest of the five inland lakes of Bavaria. It was on many of the must see top ten of Bavaria lists on the internet so we had high hopes. Unfortunately, if we found Bavaria’s answer to Portsea yesterday, today we found its answer to Rosebud.

It’s a much bigger Lake that has a boarder in Germany, Austria and Switzerland but it’s definitely the poorer cousin to Stanzberg. We started in Fredrichshafen and according to the guide book, the best way to see the small coastal towns is via ferry. However the ferry is VERY slow so it took us over and hour and ½ to go three stops. It also has a couple of famous small islands that visitors flock to each year, the most famous being Maniau. Maniau is apparently the largest and most beautiful garden in Germany. We’ve seen a few gardens including The Keokenhopft and unfortunately we found the gardens to be nothing very spectacular. They were also attached to a Schloss but that was also underwhelming and the entire thing had a touch of this 90’s kitsch thing that seems to be very popular with German tourist sites.

We wandered for a while but when it because apparent that it felt like we were in a less beautifully kept version of Melbourne’s botanic gardens we got back on our slow ferry but got off one stop earlier at Meersberg. We had a bad experience initially with the very grumpy and rude owner of an Italian restaurant, who seem to find it annoying that we were speaking to him in our best broken German and not Italian. We were only ordering coffee! However, it turned out that Meersberg was the highlight of the day. Parts of Meersberg are like those picture perfect postcard of Bavarian with pretty half wooden houses, flowers in the window boxes and scalloped wooden balustrades. We took some lovely photos and spent about an hour wandering the streets. It was late afternoon by this stage so we caught the ferry back to Fredrichshafen so we could decide what to do for dinner.

As we were so close to Austria, Geoff decided it might be nice to drive into Austria for dinner. I agreed, of course imagining snow-capped mountain vistas and quaint Austrian pubs. The reality was more like at Rosebud at the end of a four day summer long weekend. By this stage we were tired and I’d also had a run in with a fat and lazy cable car attendant that I won’t go into but I was starting to lose the plot. Eventually after me saying f**k a lot we realised that we had no choice but to stay and eat at yet another Italian restaurant as everything back in Mindelheim would be closed by the time we made it home. We did eventually find a nice restaurant back one street from the main and had a nice quite dinner. There a two issues with eating in Germany, the first is that there are really only two options – Italian or Pizza (which the Germans don’t seem to realise is the same thing) and that EVERYONE smokes especially if you sit outside. You spend half your meal inhaling passive smoke from everyone around you, it’s bloody awful.

Anyway it was a bit of a loss of a day but you get those and you live and learn. Lake Constance we won’t be back. Aufedisein.