Thursday 29th September

Mandy and Darren keep telling us that we are experts at touring Europe but seeing as they have been doing it for 5 months solid and still look like they have managed to buy diesel, LPG, food and drink I think that they are in the expert league as well. It doesn’t mean us “proper” experts don’t make mistakes though.

Darren and Mandy found Andechs, a lovely Benedictine Monastery with a brewery and a great aire which gives you discount vouchers to spend in the brewery. Andechs is shown on our AA map of the world as just a little dot whereas Wessobrunn just down the road was marked as a place of special interest, so that was the place for us.

And here is the monastery, it looks so good that I could almost think about becoming a Monk and checking the brewery output. It’s just the bells that put me off. We should have known better though, the car park was large enough for Frankie and one other, there were no signs, no ticket office, no signs of life.This wasn’t an AA place of special interest, it was an AA place of no entry. Call us experts on finding places to visit? We haven’t a clue!

The cow in the monastery field was nice enough, didn’t say much except moo with a German accent. We’ve noticed far more cows in this area, no sheep at all (no lamb in the supermarket either).

We are approaching the end of the Romantic Road and the buildings are becoming noticeably more Swiss.

The views are fantastic, the grass is so green and whilst this bit is fairly flat we are beginning to see high mountains in the distance.

Having given up on Wessobrunn we arrived at our overnight stop, Schongau, another medieval walled town but on a far smaller scale than Nordlingen. The buildings were nice enough…

… and the main street was almost completely closed for lunch, only a couple of cafes were open but it was only 11.30 and far too early for a beer photo opportunity.

One of the entrances, very similar to Nordlingen but the ivy and flower bedecked house beyond were very pretty.

So that’s it. Back at Frankie by mid day, all our visiting done and another “expert” mistake made by already having bought an overnight ticket. You’re not getting any photos of the stellplatz, nothing wrong with it but then again, nothing worth taking photos of.

We spent the afternoon menu planning. So far, we’ve been traipsing around the supermarkets, grabbing things we recognise and then trying to make meals from them. I have had a very successful run of cooking ideas (Green Thai curry sausage, turkey stir fry and one pot spaghetti bolognese) but these were all, we’ve got this, what can I do with it type meals. Since we have 21 cook books with us it was time to go through them selecting recipes and we have eight mouthwatering delectations to whet our appetite. Depending on how well they turn out will depend on wether you see a photo of our dinner – it was Lucy’s turn to cook tonight and we do have a photo at the end – bet you can’t wait!

Did we say we were going south? Guess where we are headed. Apparently these are just the Bavarian Alps and not a patch on the height of the Swiss Alps but they look pretty imposing to us.

Another Lucy photo taken as Frankie was speeding down the road.

Here is Frankie’s view from our Stellplatz today. We are in Fussen, the end of 410km of fantastic scenery, marvellous villages and beautiful buildings. We are off to see another beautiful building tomorrow but in the mean time we have managed to get all of our washing done. We have visited Aldis and Lidls (the stellplatz is sandwiched between both of them) and cycled into town.

And the town was very nice indeed, just slightly grockleish but then that is to be expected here.

This is a lovely painted church, many of the buildings here have trop lioil (is that right) effects on them.

Through the doors of the Rathaus.

And the clock tower of the Schlosshof.

The view from our table as we tried a local speciality…

… that’s right, beer. This is just one of todays beer photos to make up for the lack of one yesterday.

The Town Chemist, can you imagine Boots being decorated like this?

On the way back to Frankie we found this water feature / statue thing. The blocks at the top are sitting on a bed of water and they are all spinning – you just have to imagine it.

Todays second beer picture. Somehow I get to read some odd web pages and this is the result of one of them. What it was saying was that you can mix beer with spirits, obviously it has to be the right spirits with the right beers so whisky or rum with stout, gin with wheat beer. It all makes perfect sense to me since i have drunk beer with tequila and beer with whisky (the French are funny like that). In the shops here you can buy beer with grapefruit juice (not nice) and coke with orange juice (not something I’d try on purpose) but back to the picture. The recommendation is 50/50 beer and gin, it’s not clear wether you include the froth in the beer  but i played safe and just put a generous splash of gin in and slurped.

Have you ever wondered why you can’t buy wheat beer and gin in the shops? I can tell you why, it isn’t great (but then it wasn’t wasted!).

Here is todays tip top recipe prepared by the lovely Lucy. Tuna salad Nicoise with homemade mustard dressing – it was so good I licked the plate. Not only that, it nearly looked like the picture.