Ulm, Land of Frozen Fog

I've started to realise recently just how cold it is going to get in Ulm.  As I write this my PC's weather gadget says that it's -2 degrees centigrade outside, and I have a feeling it's going to get much colder before it gets warmer!  Thank heaven I'm going to the Great Barrier Reef to sit under a palm tree next week!

Along with the cold, there's been a lot of fog recently.  In fact almost every day for the past month has been so foggy that I can't even see the building where I work (and it's a big building) when I get off of the bus!  I first started noticing it about a month ago.

Some fog on the approach to work, about a month ago

The picture above was when the fog first started to appear.  It was to get much worse before long!  Here is another picture taken from out of my office window a few days later.

The fog gets thicker!

Ok, we've all seen fog.  There's nothing special about that, although this fog was starting to get thick enough to go into the special "Holy cow, look at that" category, especially at night when waiting for the bus at 5:30 pm when it was pitch black and all you could see up the road was a line of footpath lights trailing away into the fog...

But then something really strange happened.  Something that I've never heard of before and certainly never thought I'd see - the temperature dropped rapidly to negative and all of the thick fog that was hanging around actually froze and dropped to the ground.  Here is that same view out of my office window this morning, taken from almost the same position as the photo above:

No, it's not snow - it's frozen fog!

By later on this afternoon so much fog had frozen and fallen to the ground that the sky started to turn blue and the sun came out.  Walking to work this morning it was quite odd because I had particles of frozen fog collecting on my jacket and they looked like tiny snowflakes, but there were no clouds in the sky - if I looked up I could just see the blue of the sky showing through the fog.

The frozen fog also presents a strange sight when it lands on trees and other objects, because unlike snow, which only gathers on the top of objects, the frozen fog collects all around the object - top, bottom and both sides!

Fog covered branches

And finally one last photo - about the only bright and colourful spot in a sea of grey!

Schloß Lichtenstein (Lichtenstein Castle)

After a failed attempt to visit Schloß Lichtenstein a couple of weeks back (which I completely failed to blog due to a combination of laziness and having only a tentative Internet connection at home) where we got lost in the forest near Bad Ulrach, my travel buddy William and I decided to have another crack at it today. Anything to get away from this Ulm nebel (fog) for the day! So off we drove out of Ulm towards Blaubeuren, with the fog quickly dispersing (at expected!) as soon as we were a few miles from Ulm. But now what's this? Here's a local German sheep farmer walking up the road towards us, leading his flock of a couple of hundred sheep! We - and all other cars on the road - were thus obliged to pull over and wait for the sheep to pass.

Dumb sheep walks into car

This was a photo opportunity that we couldn't pass up so we jumped out, exchanged a guten morgen with the nonplussed looking sheep farmer and proceeded to look like a couple of silly tourists with our cameras while the locals patiently sat in their cars and waited. Well it had to be done - it's not every day that one has to stop for a large flock of sheep! A few minutes earlier I had seen a couple of other similarly large flocks of sheep being driven around in the fields next to the road, so it must be the time of year when they take them all off to become lamb chops. That's terrible. I shouldn't have made that joke!

Lichstenstein Castle

When the road was clear we proceeded onwards to Bad Ulrach, past the spot where a path led into the forest where a "short walk" had turned into a "long hike" on a previous trip and arrived finally at Schloß Lichtenstein. Schloß Lichtenstein is only a small castle, although really it's not a castle at all but more a folly which was built in an eccentric Disneyland style by King Frederick I of Württemberg in 1802. German kings and princes of the 19th century had a habit of doing this - witness the famous Schloss Neuschwanstein which itself was the inspiration for the castle used by Disney in their famous logo.

I'm finding it difficult to find information about Schloß Lichtenstein. Like many things here in Germany, most of the information to be found is in German and the English entries in Wikipedia and other sources are rather short. My friend William thinks it is related to the royal family of Liechtenstein but note the different spelling! I'm yet to find the connection in my research but it may well be there. I'll know when my German is good enough to read the historical booklet I bought at the castle, which may take a while. Ask me sometime next year.

Castle Entrance

Whether there is a connection or not, there has been a castle there since the year 1200 although it was destroyed in 1311 and 1381 and it then fell into ruin until King Frederick I came along and build his modern castle on the spot. It's in pristine condition and the rooms we went into don't have any electricity so it has a very authentic feel, right down to the fact that it was terribly cold! Only a couple of rooms had heating and that was in the form of big enamelled iron wood stoves - there were none of the open fireplaces that one would find in an English castle.

It was only a small castle so the visit didn't take long. So we headed off to Nebelhöle (Fog Cave) for some delicious Swabian Maultaschen (my favourite food here in Germany!). We wanted to go into the cave but with no money left and cold feet it was time to head back to Ulm. Credit and debit cards are not really accepted here in Germany, where the banking system seems stuck somewhere in the first half of the 20th century (when you buy something on your credit card the bank automatically takes the ENTIRE AMOUNT of out of your savings account at the end of the month!) but that's a rant for another time.