Day 90: Hausen to Rottweil, Germany: Onto the Neckar? Not so fast, eh!
Tourist information offices throughout Europe seem to share the same fault – they are local and insular. If they are open (a big if) they have information about the town they are in. Something about the region, let alone country is usually beyond them. Anyway, that’s our excuse and we are sticking to it. Had we been able to get a regional map, we would have seen that this darnn region has (at least) two, completely unrelated, towns named Schwenningan.
One Schwenningan is about 8 km (up a steep hill) from Hausen, (the one we were in, not the other two or three that happen to be scattered about the region) near Beuron, on the Donau. The other Schwenningan is about 35 km north west of Tuttlingen, on the Donau, and therefore about 70 km from the Hausen we were at, and an unkown distance from any of the others.
The Schwenningan we want is the one on the Neckar, and that is not the one near Hausen. We realized this in Hausen, as we casually chatted with the owner of the camping place there. We asked about the hill to Schwenningan, and he gladly told us about it. But when we mentioned the Neckar, he pulled out a scrap of an old regional map. Oh, oh. So we would not be starting the Neckar quite as fast as all that!
It meant that we had to start the day crawling back up the Donau, 35 km, to Tuttlingen. Just as with coming up from Ulm, this trip was full of half memories of places we had been, had seen, had stopped at. For example, we passed the place near Beuron where we had first met Christiane and Robert, the couple that we linked up with again in Vienna. We passed the campground where we had stayed that was mainly a canoe and kayak rental, and that had a large Kaufland supermarket nearby.
Finally, we arrived at Tuttlingen, the place where we had had such a hard time finding the camping, where the city seemed so dirty, and where only the areas right by the (quite small) Donau seemed to have any appeal.
This time we were determined to give the town a second chance. We went into the old town, looking for tourist information (and that elusive regional map), and for some old town charm. We maybe did find a small bit of charm, and the streets seemed a lot cleaner, but tourist information was closed, and anyway lacked any signage. We were lucky to find the closed office. Humpph.
Next step was to find the way out of town, toward Schwenningan, or maybe Rottweil, which is a little farther along the Neckar. Signage, or course, was minimal to non-existent. For example, at a footbridge over the Donau we found a sign for Rottweil and the “Hohenzollernweg”. That was the first and last such sign!
However, with an hour or so of coursing back and forth and asking a few people, we got onto the right path, at least for a while. The route was marked, for some reason, not by a crown, which we had seen and assumed was associated with the Hohenzollernweg (Hohenzollers were former rulers of this area), but by a beer stein, which is associated with who knows what.
About halfway to Rottweil, in Spaichingen, the signs disappeared, But we spotted a bikeshop and outside a nice young couple steered me straight (in English) while inside Dodie got the same information in German. The German version presumably had a lot more sign language mixed in. The young couple had cycled in Greece and also Australia, and so had a natural empathy for anyone with a loaded touring bike.
After a while we had cycled far enough for our position to appear on our Neckar radweg map, from which point onwards life was much easier.
As this is being written, we have entered Rottweil, but not scoped it out at all. We have not found the pedestrian streets or the Rathaus. What we did find was the “festplatz” or fairgrounds. We just took one spin around, and found the grounds (there must be a building too) covered with (wait for it) Rottweiler dogs. It must be a show, and all over there are people with kennel trailers, cars, and tents. The tents are thrown up helter skelter. Since we can detect no camping platz in this town (or in most places along the Neckar route) our plan is to join the crowd, on a piece of grass somewhere.
Right now we are in an Italian restaurant, eating pizza (not bad!) and waiting for it to be a little darker. When morning comes, we will try to find the actual Neckar, and to appreciate what may be the real Rottweil, assuming a pack of namesake dogs does not eat us in the night!
p.s. We still are limping along with the last dregs of internet time we have for our T-Mobile stick. The German LIDL stick, that worked so well before, still refuses to connect, or more likely, is being refused connection. We're working on it (I hope)!
The misty cliff behind the campsite. It's cold today.
The campsite had about 20 VW campers. At home, our VW van is a bit of an oddball.In the middle of the USA, it's almost unheard of. Here, it's almost always a VW. If it's not a VW, though, it's a Mercedes or maybe a Renault.
Schloss Bronnen in the background. On our trip though Europe, the castle on the hill has been a constant thing to look for and find. I say I can't understand why they built them up there. Dodie says I therefore would not have survived 10 minutes in the 13th century.
This unintentionally blurry shot illustrates scads of tourists coming our way along the route from Donaueschingen. Light levels were low, accounting for the slow shutter speed, but I would like to think that both I and the oncoming tourists were whizzing along. (Ok, maybe they
These nice kids were cycling Donaueschingen to Ulm, on a short vacation. It's their first time out on bikes. They were really impressed by the spot, nor far from Tuttlingen, where the Donau disappears underground. Despite their urging, we did not backtrack to go see it.
The "continental divide". Waters now will go to the Atlantic and not the Black Sea. This divide was way way easier to cross than the one in Montana or Alberta.
