Tag: Nesselwang

Nesselwang, and back to Ehningen

Pretzels, Laugenstange & Tafelbrötchen successfully bought, though at 08:30 they’d almost sold out.

I’d said in an earlier post that Nesselwang didn’t seem to have changed much. Actually it has,  but it wasn’t obvious at first. It’s more up-market than it used to be. Although the buildings haven’t changed, the occupants of some of the shops have. The old wine and spirits shop has gone, and has been replaced by a clothes shop selling traditional alpine dress, e.g. Dirndls & Lederhosen. There was a shop dummy sporting a pair of very attractive Lederhosen, but at an eye-watering price of €949. I’ve since been told that’s actually at the lower end of the price range. There are other “sports” clothes shops aimed at the holiday-making alpine walker; all very expensive.

Nesselwang always was a fairly unremarkable ski resort; after all, it’s not really high enough to be “snow-secure”. Notwithstanding that, there’s a new Kabinenbahn (cable car), though – judging from the fullness of the car park at 10:30am – it used mostly by walkers, and & sure it’s a fabulous place to go walking.

Brauerei Gasthof Post. It seems not to have changed at all. I still have a couple of unopened bottles from here that I must have bought in 1986 or 1987.

I enquired whether it was possible to take a mountain bike up the ski lift: Yes, it is. Trouble is, there are no marked MTB trails (only walking trails) and – whilst I’m sure there would have been a good morning’s riding to be had, without a guide, I would probably have spent most of the time going down blind trails and having to push back up, or running down walkers.

We stayed on the Wohnmobilstellplatz in Nesselwang – a rest-stop set-aside purely for motorhomes (cars & caravans not allowed) – lying just at the bottom of the ski lift. It’s a fabulous location, if not a little short on facilities (like loos & showers, though we’re self-sufficient in that department). And at just €8 per 24hr + €0.50 per 0.5KWh of electricity (if you need electric hookup – and we only need it to recharge the laptop – we can run the fridge off gas, and the lights off the spare battery, which gets recharged either when the engine’s running or from the solar panel on the roof), it represents pretty good value for money. Again, I can only marvel at the foresight of the local authorities in providing such facilities, and can similarly only bemoan not just the absence, but the illegality of this, back in the UK where you’re not allowed to stop anywhere without…

  • permission
  • paying vast sums of money
  • being driven bonkers by late-night drug-dealers and/or idiots doing donuts
  • being moved-on/arrested for vagrancy/being a traveller
Nesselwang’s Stellplatz – a pretty scary-looking place (not)
Looking up to the Alpspitz from the Stellplatz.

We left Nesselwang about lunchtime, heading back to our daughter’s house in Ehningen – we had to be back in time for our eldest grand-daughter’s 5th birthday. Again, we decided to keep off the Autobahnen as much as possible, so we headed across the Schwäbische Alb, cutting off a big motorway dog-leg in favour of smaller roads through a million small villages. All went well until we hit the rush-hour traffic in Reutlingen and (less so) in Tübingen.

We’re now here for a few days and the weather has been vile. Thunderstorms seem to have caught up with us again and it’s pretty cool. SHould improve from Thursday.

Next on our travels may be Munich, Nuremberg and Bamberg. Lots of ancient breweries & pubs in Bamberg; not to mention the unusual Rauchbiers (smoked beers) that the town is famous for.

San Valentino alla Muta to Nesselwang

Sun, 27th Jul, 2014:

I actually managed to sleep last night without having to get up and shut all the windows. That’s mainly because it was so cold, we didn’t have any of the windows or skylights open. When I say cold, it must have been all of 12° C – a temperature not encountered for several months. In fact, I don’t think we’ve experienced anything under 20° C for the last month, so this was a bit of a shock to the system.

Today, we didn’t actually intend to travel very far, so a leisurely breakfast followed by a bike ride seemed the thing to do.

San Valentin nestles at 1470 metres above sea level between two lakes: Lakes Rescia (Reschensee) and Muta (Haidersee). Lago di Rescia is quite long – about 8km – with the small town of (guess what) Rescia at the Northen end. Rescia is the last town in Italy before the Austrian border. We decided to do a round trip of Lago di Rescia.

It was still pretty cool when we set off into the teeth of a Northerly wind. Being a lake, the trail around it was pretty flat and so easy going, although there are a few short, sharp climbs & descents on the Western side as we came back.

There were loads of kite-surfers out on the lake, though not a single windsurfer. Seems like windsurfing is pretty much dead these days :-(.

Kitesurfers. I noticed they were all wearing winter wetsuits!

The most interesting thing about Lago di Rescia – apart from it being in a stunning location – is that it has the top of a church tower sticking out of it, by the town of Curon Venosta. An odd place to build a church tower, you might think, but this one was built long before the lake existed, and succumbed to more contemporary requirements for consistent water supplies. It’s now a protected structure, apparently floating on the lake.

I wonder what happened to the clock?

We cycled up to the border crossing; about 2km N from the top of the lake. We can now claim to have cycled from Italy to Austria and back in a day!

Surely not a selfie?
The orange Orange at 1455m (MTB people will understand)

Time to move on…

We hit the road after lunch (i.e. about 15:30!), over the top of the pass where we’d cycled, & on into Austria, pausing only to buy the obligatory “vignette” that allows you to use the Austrian Autobahnen – valid for 10 days, mind.

Over Fernpass – a wonderful, twisty, steep pass that bring back memories from long ago when we lived in Germany, and travelled over Fernpass several times. We got lucky with traffic today: It was all heading South. And there was a heck of a lot of it. An astonishing number of vehicles were Dutch and Belgian – probably 30% of all vehicles – with the remainder being German, Austrian and Italian.

We crossed Austria in surprisingly quick time, leaving us feel ripped-off for the vignette, and on into Germany. We have holed-up in Nesselwang in the Allgäu – the southern-most part of Bavaria – for the night. Again, it’s a place that holds lots of memories for us having stayed here several times when we used to live in Germany. We also came here with both Joy’s parents & my parents on separate occasions, and once with Joy’s sister (in the winter). Nothing much has changed – which pleases me greatly, as there is no need for anything to change. The Gasthof Post Brauerei is still there, as is the Gasthof Bären – where we felt compelled to have a quick beer tonight.

Gasthof Bären, Nesselwang

We also located the Bäckerei, so I can look forward to major pretzel overload for breakfast tomorrow. It’ll make a change from all the horrible bread we had to endure in Italy!