Castles, lakes and the Black Forest

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Our short visit to southern Germany turned out to be a mixed bag for us on this trip.

We entered via Austria and made our way past some beautiful lakes towards the town of Fussen. Like everyone else, we went to the area to visit the famous Neuschwanstein Castles. This fairytale castle was apparently the inspiration for the castle at Disneyland!

We really enjoyed our visit to the castles but were pretty devastated to find that the whole side of the castle was covered with scaffolding! Such a shame because the view from the swing bridge over the gully is amazing. Much better than the view you get from actually visiting the castle. Guttered - I had to buy postcards for my photo album this time!

After finding all the camping grounds near Fussen to be full, we headed out around the lakes and came across our friendliest site yet. It was completely full of Germans who keep their caravans on the site all year. They use them like second homes so caravans have little flower gardens, picket fences and feature lighting! We did look a bit out of place in ol Brian but everyone was really friendly and didn’t hold our grubbiness against us!

We spent the afternoons collapsed down on the lake edge doing some serious relaxing. If it hadn’t been so hot then we would have been out exploring the amazing cycle paths that crisscrossed over the countryside. Wow, Germany really knows the true meaning of ‘cycle path’ - they looked amazing!


The next stop was Lake Constance where we did get off our butts and get out cycling again. The cycle paths along the lake were awesome. The paths link the villages along the lakefront. The nicest part of the lakes have vineyards and orchards running down to the water edge. There were plenty of good swimming spots and we had probably one of our longest lake swims in the trip so far - the water was a lot warmer than Lake Bohinj! The little village of Mersburg was our favourite. Shame we didn’t bother to take a camera!

Surprisingly, rain greeted us on our second day at Lake Constance so we decided to forget the trip out to the flower Island and instead packed up and drove towards The Black Forest.

Our Black Forest experience ended up being more hassle than it was worth. We wanted to visit Frieburg as we had heard good things about it but we couldn’t find any parking that didn’t have height restrictions. I’m sure there is campervan parking in the town but it definitely wasn’t well signposted! Annoyed, we had to leave and ended up spending the night in an unusually empty little camping ground that came with its own small cemetery….

The next day we decided to give the Black Forest another chance and set off along the scenic tourist route towards Baden Baden. While the drive was quite pretty, it definitely didn’t live up to the hype in the brochures. After hours of driving, we finally made it to Baden Baden and drove around in circles trying to find a car park for campers. Damn it all - same problem. By this time we were getting pretty @#$%^ off and ridiculously hot, so we headed out to the nearest camp ground we could find - about 7 miles away!

This camping ground was definitely the type of place we go out of our way to avoid. Can you believe it: over 3000 camping pitches! And most of these were full. It was like a ‘complete little world’ with bars, restaurants, a supermarket and two lakes. We asked the lady at reception if we could catch a bus to Baden Baden and she looked at us as if we were mad. We stayed one night and managed to do bit of a bike ride and have a swim in the lake. Pretty early the next day, we packed up Brian and headed north once again.

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