Friedrichshafen and Bodensee

Or, to those outside Germany, Friedrichshafen and Lake Constance.  I'll use Bodensee because I'm trying to learn German.

Lunch view at Bodensee/Lake Constance

The Green House of Friedrichshafen

My workmate and exploring buddy William had rented a nice new hire car for a week so we decided we needed to give it a spin on the German autobahn, where they drive ridiculously fast.  No point pottering around Ulm in a new European car.  On the autobahn he mentioned that he didn't know the speed limit and hadn't seen any signs, at which point it occurred to me that there wasn't a speed limit!  We were heading for Friedrichshafen (that never gets any easier to type, no matter how many times I write it), a drive of about 100 kilometres each way.  Friedrichshafen is on the edge of Bodensee, a wonderful freshwater lake that borders Germany, Switzerland and Austria and which is large enough to not be able to see the other side, which gives it a "by the ocean" feel, even though you are in the middle of Europe and have the Alps between you and the sea!  Someone did mention that it doesn't feel entirely "by the ocean" because it doesn't have the salty smell of a real ocean.  Good point but it's oceanic enough for me, especially when I was sitting out the front of one of the seaside restaurants drinking Italian coffee and looking out towards Switzerland!  Being south of Ulm, Friedrichshafen is about 100 kilometres closer to Italy and it showed, with lots of Italian coffeeshops by the water, which is just fine for a caffiene addict like me!

In the spring or summer I hope to ride my pushbike from Ulm to Bodensee.  There is an apparently quite popular route that goes there and it's flat all the way.  Sounds good!

Pretty but cold!

So we had coffee and wandered around thinking how pretty Bodensee is and how nice it would be in the summer.  Although it looks good in the photos on this page, it was starting to get pretty chilly and my London "winter" clothes were proving to be not quite up to the job of keeping me warm!  This was especially the case when we walked out to the end of the breakwater jetty by the harbour and up the 8 or 9 storey high tower at the end of it.  Beautiful view but can we go down now please?

Friedrichshafen and the Zeppelin Museum

As pretty as the outdoors were, I had discovered before leaving that Friedrichshafen was where the famous (or is that infamous?) Zeppelins were built between 1900 and 1937, and as such there is a Zeppelin Museum there.  Now of course a nerd like me can't possibly resist a Zeppelin museum and so we went in there and spent the entire rest of the afternoon there, until it closed!  It's in the old hafenbahnhof (harbour railway station), a beautiful 1930s Bauhaus building.  Apart from the typically nerdy type of things that one would expect to find in a Zeppelin museum such as propellers, engines etc. (there isn't much left of the original Zeppelins) and large amounts of various tacky "souvenirs" from the Zeppelin's heyday (it was, after all, a phenomenally popular attraction in its day and from what I understand from the museum, Germany underwent what could only be described as "Zeppelin mania" during the 1920s and 1930s), there is also a full sized mockup of a part of the interior of the passenger cabin from that most famous Zeppelin of them all - the Hindenberg.

Passenger hallway "in" the Hindenburg

Sleeping cabin '30s Hindenburg style!

I'm told that the interior is quite faithful to the original.  It is amazingly modern and I thought that it didn't look too different to the interior of a modern cruise ship!  Certainly it doesn't look like something built 75 years ago, but then at that point Europe was in the throes of Art Deco mania, and Germany was leading the way with its wonderful modernist Bauhaus movement, so I suppose it's no surprise that the inside of the Hindenberg looked almost 21st century!  One thing that was quite noticeable however was that everything was obviously built to be as light as possible.  It was quite easy to see that the walls - while looking quite solid - could have been picked up with one hand.  Indeed I had seen a video earlier in the day where a small boy picked up a 5 metre long triangular girder and was able to hold it in one hand!

Long haired passenger in the Hindenburg lounge

But now the museum was closing and we had to leave, me grumbling about "I can't read the bloody information panels" and "The problem with German museums is that there's no point going until you can read German" - sayings that have become my catchcry since coming here.  As a slightly obsessive museum goer who insists on reading every word of every information panel, I can tell you I'm suffering!

So then it was a slightly longer trip home along the back roads, through pretty little villages and the larger Ravensburg, a slightly panicked "Oh no, we're almost out of petrol" moment just before Ulm, a lovely kebab plate at the local Turkish kebab shop (only €5.50 - bargain!) and that was the end of my third weekend in Germany!