22 April: Beyond the Bodensee

The weather has been positively divine for nearly a month now. I think the last precipitation we got was the snow at the end of March. It’s been sunny and in the 70s and there’s no end in sight. I’m starting to get worried about the garden – Frau D has been out watering her carefully-tended pansies in our front yard. Not wanting to miss out on the fabulous weather, we decided to head back to the Bodensee today, this time making more of a scenic drive out of it (which I realized later was a really inappropriate way to celebrate Earth Day). We kept the top up for the first part of the trip, allowing John to set a new personal speed record of 230 kilometers per hour. That’s 142 miles per hour for you Americans. When he slowed down to 120 kph (about 80 mph) I said, “Boy, this sure feels slow!”

We took the same route as last time to get to the Bodensee, stopping to take some pictures of a lovely church overlooking the lake, and some "beauty shots" of the SLK (above and right). This time we bypassed Meersburg and kept driving east along the lakeshore for a while. At Friedrichshafen we turned north again, leaving the lake behind, and went in search of a scenic route called the Oberschwäbische Barockstraße that is marked in our regional atlas. We never actually found the scenic route, but we found plenty of pretty roads anyway. We stopped for lunch in the town of Ravensburg – an economic center on par with Augsburg at one time, but reduced to a “medieval backwater” by the Thirty Years’ War. Its obscurity saved the town’s ancient walls and towers, which now stand as proud reminders of its medieval past. Fourteen gates and towers survive, and I managed to snap pictures of at least half of them on our way in and out of town.

We parked in an underground garage near a couple of cafés where about a hundred Sunday motorcyclists were gathered. We strolled down to the elongated Marienplatz, ringed by the late-Gothic Rathaus, the 15^th-century Weighing House with its tall watchman’s tower (visible in the photo, above right), and the intricately-frescoed Lederhaus, once the headquarters of the city’s leather workers. We ate lunch outside at the Café-Restaurant Central (the orange umbrellas in the photo at right) in sight of the Grüner Turm (named for the green tiles on its roof, some of which are 14^th-century originals) and also spotted the tall, white-washed Mehlsack (Flour Sack) Tower standing on a hill above the city.

For lunch I had a nice mozzarella, tomato, and arugula salad with a glass of Chardonnay, but John had the winning meal: a salad of balsamic-glazed steak with arugula, radicchio, and shaved parmesan. I’m going to have to try to recreate this dish! I had to wait an interminably long time for my salad, but otherwise it was a lovely lunch. Total bill was 24 Euro.

Our next stop was Weingarten, just a few miles north of Ravensburg, where we stopped to visit the huge Basilika (right), the largest baroque church in Germany. It became a pilgrimage site after receiving a vial purported to contain a few drops of Christ’s blood. We walked up the steep steps to the church, where a group of young people were singing along to a guitar. One of them was standing up and evangelizing loudly across the courtyard to no one in particular.

We could hear organ music emanating from the church and John thought maybe there was an afternoon service taking place, but I spied a sign that announced a Sunday organ concert at 3:00. It was now 3:45, so we were lucky enough to be able to step inside and catch the last few minutes of the concert. The interior (below right) is beautifully decorated in intricate white stucco, with colorful ceiling frescoes and a huge Frisoni altar that is nearly 80 feet high. The organ, which was installed in 1750, is among the largest in the country and, of course, sounded beautiful.

We got back on the road and I mapped out a crazy, convoluted scenic route home, following the B-32 through Altshausen, Bad Saulgau, and Riedlingen. We passed countless secluded country hamlets and fields of espaliered cherry trees in full bloom (below). Then we hooked up with the Deutsche Alleenstraße across the Donau River, through Zwiefalten (home to a beautiful monastery), and on through a lovely area called the Zwiefaltel Alb. We continued to follow the B-32 through Lichtenstein, admiring the Schloss perched on its sheer cliff high above the valley (below). We hadn’t passed through here in a year and a half.

We continued on past Tübingen and then skirted a large wooded area on backroads. I gave up using the map and we just followed the signs in the general direction of Böblingen and Sindelfingen until we came out somewhere we recognized. Another beautiful Sunday drive in Deutschland!

20 April: Frischlingen!

I took my camera on my walk this afternoon to capture one of those perfect spring days when everything seems right with the world. The sun was shining through the delicate new beech leaves in the most spectacular way and Cody kept getting annoyed at me for stopping to admire the scene.

I was lucky enough to encounter this spring’s crop of Frischlingen (baby wild boar) right up close to the fence. I took a whole bunch of pictures and a couple of short videos.

The protective mama pig was not too happy about Cody being so close to her little ones and rushed the fence a couple of times. An older couple was throwing pieces of bread into the enclosure, so that kept them near the fence for a quite a while (normally they get bored if they figure out you don’t have any food and move away). The little ones were soooo cute! Just like Babe in the movies, only with more hair, and spots and stripes, and probably sharper teeth...

19 April: Lovely Ludwigsburg

This afternoon I drove to Ludwigsburg (without a navi, no less – and I only made one wrong turn) to check out the tulips in the Baroque gardens. I had been putting this off for a while, but I am really glad I went today because I just caught the tulips towards the end of their prime. All of the daffodils were done and the rhododendrons were starting to bloom. They had a whole different color scheme of tulips in the formal gardens, which means they must rip out the bulbs every year and plant new ones – what an enormous job! I was surprised and saddened to see that the gorgeous white flowering tree (which I still haven’t identified, but I think is some sort of Asian magnolia), which was in full bloom on the 25^th of April last year, was completely leafed out already, with not a single petal remaining. However, there was another tree in full bloom – a cherry tree loaded with clusters of fluffy cotton candy pink blossoms – that almost made up for missing the magnificent white tree.

I made my rounds of the lower gardens, then climbed up to the Ostergarten, where all of the purple hyacinths were long gone, but the wisteria vines were about to explode into full bloom. The most spectacular tulips were near the greenhouses, where I encountered a veritable sea of blossoms in shades of yellow, red, and pink. The tulip beds on the south facade of the palace had been planted this year in a candy-colored scheme of pink-and-white and red-and-yellow tulips over a bed of purple-centered white pansies. It was not quite as dramatic as last year’s deep purple and red color scheme, but still stunning. After walking the length of the gardens to get some nice long-distance shots of the palace, I headed back to the parking lot and home. I had a feeling I might get lost if I tried to retrace my route through Feuerbach, so I just took the B-27 all the way into Stuttgart and came home via Schlossstraße. (And yes, I checked, it really is spelled with a triple “s”!).

16 April: Planning Our Trip Home

We’ve finally got the dates nailed down for our trip home to Michigan in May, so today I spent some time making phone calls to set up our doctor and dentist appointments. We’ll be going for a week, and hope to do some spring cleaning in the yard while we’re there. We’ll need to arrange for a lawn mowing service over the summer, renew our mail forwarding, and take care of any other little items around the house that need fixing. John’s going to check out what the baggage limit is for us on the corporate jet because we also want to start bringing some stuff home (somehow we’ve acquired quite awful lot more stuff than we originally brought over).

I'm spending lots of time sitting at my computer with the window open, letting the sights and smells of spring waft in...there were a few brief days when the horse chestnut, the cherry tree and the wisteria on our balcony were all blooming simultaneously!