Sunday 25th September

We seem to be speeding through the Romantic Road faster than we would normally travel and I’m thinking it may be due to a date that I have with a large stein of Bavarian beer. Really don’t want to miss the Beer Festival but now having moved on to Augsburg with only one short step to get to Munich can we think about slowing?

Our stellplatz in Augsburg was one of two, both of which received very low ratings. This received a 6 out of 10 mainly due to the noise coming from the river as it gurgles over the rocks. Let them moaning minnies go to Nordlingen and listen to the bells. Haven’t heard any bells yet, but then I can’t hear anything over the noise coming from the river!

Augsburg is one of the oldest cities in Germany, founded in 15BC by the Romans, it’s actually named after Augustus when one of his sons set up a camp next to the river (not our river, another quieter river). It is the third largest city in Bavaria after Munich and Nuremberg so off we walked into town (me happily whistling to myself because it is Sunday and all the shops would be shut).

On the way we stopped in at the train station and food out that there was a train every 15 minutes into Munich and it takes 30 minutes to get there, we were thinking of catching the train in instead of trying to find somewhere to squeeze Frankie’s fat arse into so started playing with the ticket machine. We think we pressed the right buttons, 2 adults, return trip on Monday – only €75, thank you very much but no. We’ll chance it with the parking.

Big building, our Fodors guide to Germany (1998 edition) isn’t very helpful but I’ve since found out it is the Stadt Theatre. And then things went wrong – very wrong.

With a little squeal of delight Lucy said that department store is open, and that shop and that shop and look at all the people.

Every shop was open and the place was full of shoppers. We really weren’t expecting this since we knew that Lidls and Aldis do close on Sundays.

The main square was full of kids, there was a play going on and face painting, clowns, and people dressed up as ducks giving out sweets. This is the Town Hall, when it was built in the early 17th century it was the largest in Germany. Now it is just the finest Renaissance secular building north of the Alps.

Just look, even more shops going off into the distance, luckily there was my type of place just under those umbrellas.

What more could you want on a hot sunny day? Far better than an ice cream and it contains three of your daily five a day (wheat, hops and barley).

This is St Ulrich and Afra, built over a Roman cemetery. St Ulrich helped defeat the Hungarian army on the banks of the Lech River (the quieter one) and St Afra was martyred here in 304.

My vast experience of cars tells me that this is an MG. It’s an earlier version of the MGBGT that I had and in slightly better condition too. It looked like there was going to be a show of vintage cars so we hung around for half an hour but nothing happened and we wandered off.

This is the Weberhaus, looks interesting but we have no information about it at all.

Now the quandary we have is:- do we revisit the city in the morning, go and have a look at the houses of Brecht and Holbein, see where Mozarts’ dad lived, find the two palaces and the city walls, see the Red Tower and the Fuggerai (a form of early social housing still in use today) or rush off to Munich in case they run out of beer before we get there?

Decisions, decisions. We will only find out once Lucy has read the blog and made her mind up.