Germany 2025 - Twins, Towers and as Extraordinary Church

Tuesday 7th October - Schongau

A quiet night bearing in mind we backed on to the railway. We left Nordlingen and headed for Landsberg am Lech. 

We found a car park but couldn’t find any motorhome spaces although there should have been 8, but we found another car park and parked next to Kiwi’s twin 😃  

Landsberg was built on the River Lech and at the entrance to the town was a man made weir which was very pretty.   The old town has some pretty buildings and a few have art painted on them.  Sadly it appears that there was a lot more of the town, including some town walls, which we didn’t see.  It is a busy town with lots of cars driving through, but the old square is traffic free. 

There is an unusual half tower called The Jungfernsprung dating back to the 14th century.  In the 19th century, it was significantly raised to accommodate a water pressure tank. There is a legend dating back to the Thirty Years' War, when women are said to have jumped from the tower to their deaths to escape the invading Swedish soldiers. 

The town is noted for its prison where Adolf Hitler was incarcerated in 1924. During this incarceration Hitler wrote/dictated his book Mein Kampf together with Rudolf Hess. His cell, number 7, became part of the Nazi cult and many followers came to visit it during the German Nazi-period. Landsberg am Lech was also known as the town of the Hitler Youth.

In the outskirts of this town existed a concentration camp complex, Kaufering, where over 30,000 victims were imprisoned under inhuman conditions, resulting in the death of around 14,500 of them.  Kaufering was a system of eleven subcamps of the Dachau concentration camp located around the town of Landsberg am Lech in Bavaria, which operated between June 18, 1944, and April 27, 1945. 

     Our next, and last, town was Schongau, where we found our Aire by the River Lech.  The footpath up to the town was all uphill with lots of steps. Some of the steps had a stream running beside them.  We staggered up to the top and through a lovely gate in the town walls.   

The town was attractive though busy, cars were parked everywhere.  We did manage to find an ice cream parlour though.

Coming down the steps was a lot easier 😃 though Richard’s knee was playing him up. Rio and I went across the road to look at the river, the bank was quite steep and he decided to have the zoomies - I was worried he would zoom into the water!

Rio has managed to embarrass us three times in the last few days. Twice, when Richard and I were studying a map, a German lady had to point out that Rio had done a poo!  Today he saw a boy, about 12, with a guitar on his back and he freaked out!  He barked at the poor boy who looked terrified!

93 miles  Wednesday 8th October - Fussen

A quiet night until 6am when a lorry woke me up 😕. I’d just got back to sleep when school children started gathering for their school bus at 7am!!  

I tried a new supermarket today, REWE.  It was a nice shop with a huge beer section!

We were off to the Pilgrimage Church of Wies.  I thought it was a small building so was very surprised when I saw just how big it was.  The church is an oval Rococo building, built in the late 1740s. Because of its outstanding Rococo architecture it is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  When I went in there was a man giving a speech of some sort in German.  As he finished everyone clapped - I wondered what he was talking about!  Next thing the organ started up, it was wonderful looking round the amazing building with the organ booming out.  The ceiling was something else, it was very hard to take photos without falling over!  The pulpit was really ornate, but right in the middle of the church is a wooden statue of Christ and it’s that the church was built for.  It is said that in 1738 a miracle happened when tears were seen on the statue which was in the middle of a field.  A wooden chapel was built in the fields but there were so many pilgrims to the small building that it was decided to build a splendid sanctuary for the statue. 

The hamlet of Wies, in 1738, is said to have been the setting of a miracle in which tears were seen on a simple wooden figure of Christ mounted on a column that was no longer venerated by the Premonstratensian monks of the Abbey. A wooden chapel constructed in the fields housed the miraculous statue for some time. However, pilgrims from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and even Italy became so numerous that the Abbot of the Premonstratensians of Steingaden decided to construct a splendid sanctuary. The choir was consecrated in 1749, and the remainder of the church finished by 1754. 

The next stop was to look at the outside of Neuchwanstein Castle.  We couldn’t go in as dogs aren’t allowed.  We had hoped to go to a bridge and a waterfall where you can get a good view of the castle but we couldn’t take the motorhome down the road, so we turned around and drove back the way we had come, stopping so that I could take some photos.

King Ludwig II of Bavaria felt the need to escape from the constraints he saw himself exposed to in Munich, and commissioned Neuschwanstein Castle on the remote northern edges of the Alps as a retreat.  Ludwig chose to pay for the palace out of his personal fortune and by means of extensive borrowing rather than Bavarian public funds. Construction began in 1869 but was never completed. The castle was intended to serve as a private residence for the king but he died in 1886, and it was opened to the public shortly after his death. Since then, more than 61 million people have visited Neuschwanstein Castle.  In April 1945, the SS considered blowing up the palace to prevent the building and the artwork it contained from falling to the enemy. The plan was not realised by the SS-Gruppenführer who had been assigned the task, and at the end of the war the palace was surrendered undamaged to representatives of the Allied forces. The Allied occupation authorities eventually returned the palace to the reconstituted Bavarian state government.

We then found our campsite, which was huge with lots of touring caravans made into bungalows!  Some looked really tatty but most were lovely but very cramped up together.  The site is situated on the edge of a lake, Bannwaldsee, and our pitch was very close to it.  We sat for a while on a bench just looking over the lake until Rio got bored!  We walked alongside for as far as we could and then returned to Kiwi for a glass of wine in the early evening sun.  Later there was an amazing sunset.

47 miles Thursday 9th October - Offenbach an der Queich

It was a driving day, mostly boring motorway’s. We started off in the rain but it cleared up later.  The traffic was heavy too.

We stopped for some lunch and set off again. A huge lorry kept pulling up beside us and hooting. It was a bit intimidating until Richard checked the step and it hadn’t retracted.  We had to stop at the next ‘P’ and sort it out. The WD40 will be out when we stop!

Google suddenly took us off the motorway and right through the middle of Pforzheim, which wasn’t very funny, but we weren’t alone!  When we finally got back on the motorway there wasn’t a car going our way and there was a horrendous queue going the other way. Richard felt better when he realised that it wasn’t Google doing its thing of diverting us unnecessarily!

We crossed the Rhine, it was very wide and had a very fast flow on it.

We went round the city of Ulm which is on the Danube.  The city has an amazing Gothic Protestant church famed for having the tallest church tower in the world at 539 feet.  Construction began in 1377 and the building was completed in 1890, financed and built primarily by the citizens of Ulm as a symbol of civic pride.   During World War II, a devastating air raid, on December 17th 1944, destroyed most of Ulm's historic center, but Ulm Minster miraculously sustained only minor damage, standing as a symbol of endurance amidst widespread destruction. While two bombs fell on the church in late 1944 and March 1945, they did not detonate. The Minster's survival is attributed to luck or possibly its use as a landmark by Allied aircraft.  

Our stop over was at Offenbach an der Queich. (Offenbach at the Queich), the Queich being a river that is a tributary of the Rhine.  We were beside a park which Rio really appreciated.  It was €5 for 24 hours and we had electricity which was charged at 50 cents per kilowatt.

Today’s photos are mainly of Mountain views which I love.

205 miles