We had yet another big, long breakfast with Sigfried and Andrea on their patio.
Peter joined us and we drove toward the Bodensee, also known as the Lake of Konstanz, and colloquially as “the Schwabian Ocean”. Our first stop along the shore was in Hagnau. We parked and took a walk through the vineyards on the hills just outside the town, then looped back along the lake shore.
We drove west to Meersburg where we had pizzas at the Statweingut (“state’s vintner”), which belongs to the state of Baden-Württemberg. Their patio overlooks a tiny harbor, and several passenger ferries came and went while we ate. We ended up tasting several of their wines while eating our lunch of pizzas.
Then we drove down the hill and onto the auto ferry to Konstanz. It was a short ride in a nice, modern ferry.
In Konstanz we drove across the Rhein and found a parking garage. The C200 is not a large car, but it sure seemed large trying to park in this garage.
We walked around and found three churches, one of them gigantic, within a few blocks from each other. Then Peter led us to a former monastery which is now an up-scale hotel. The courtyard had murals all around depicting various events from centuries past. He also showed us a restaurant room that was not obvious, and which had wonderful old wood paneling walls.
We walked toward the old harbor area, but stopped to watch a guy trying to cross part of a stream on a long slack line. He caught the line after falling once and had an impressive maneuver to get back up on the line. He fell again, though, and that time ended up in the water.
At the old harbor is the council building where Catholic bishops met in the early 1400’s and eventually decided to execute Jan Hus, one of the first reformers of the church.
We tried to find the famous Rathaus on the way back to the car, but missed it. We had seen some other neat old buildings anyway, we had a long drive back to Biberach, and people were getting tired.
We stopped for a late dinner at the pub at the Hotel Grüner Baum in Hochdorf. The food there was fantastic.
Biberach was only a few kilometers further, but then we stayed up late eating chocolate and drinking pear liqueurs and Becherovka, which I’d never had before.
