Posted by Rainer Brockerhoff (away):
Well, here I am at a huge Internet Café in München, near the Hauptbahnhof (Central Station). Besides me is a sign saying “400 more PCs downstairs!” I’ve purchased nearly half an hour of credit (1 hour is Euro 1,80), so this’ll have to be a llittle briefer than I planned… and I’m just hating the German keyboard, Y and Z are interchanged and most punctuation is elsewhere. Grrh :X

The trip has been going quite smoothly, some minor glitches with the car rental excepted. More about that later. We’ve been lucky in getting excellent hotels at reasonable prices, despite the holidays, which we hadn’t previously been aware of. “Pfingsten” was last Sunday and Monday, and it seems to be followed by two weeks of school holydays, so everything’s crowded and more expensive.

Here’s a fast review of our week so far. We arrived in Frankfurt where my cousin Jürgen (the “jcwuesthoff” who posted below) met us, helped straigthen out our luggage which somehow had arrived earlier by a different airline and drove us to my aunt’s house in Ingelheim, where we spent two happy days eating and getting over the jetlag.

On Saturday, we got our rental car – a tiny Ford Ka – and drove to Stuttgart, where I looked in vain for some extra accessories for my Pentax. We then went on to the Bodensee (Lake Constance), having a very tough time finding a hotel – both because of the aforementioned holidays and because the nearby boarding school at Salemhad a biannual alumni reunion.

The hours spent driving around were worth it though, because we lucked into a very comfortable hotel in Heiligenberg. The next day we drove down to Salem, where we met our friends who live in a small castle which also is a gate into the school. More about that later.

Needless to say, I took hundreds of photos which I’ll probably be able to post only when I get back. I’m getting used to some quirks with the Pentax – the autofocusing system has a delay which isn’t suitable for action photos, so on the first days I took quite a few pictures of my feet, thinking the photo had already been taken at the beep, when in fact this meant that focusing had been done.

After two more days eating well and driving around the north bank of the Bodensee, we decided to press on to München. However, we took the opportunity to take the long way around (counterclockwise). going into Switzerland over the Rhine, driving south, then briefly into Bregenz (Austria), and back into Germany’s Allgäu province.

We slept in the nice little town of Füssen and the next day visited Neuschwanstein castle before going on to München, a bustling city of 1.5 people.