Friday May 24 -- Friedrichshafen

I didn't get to try frankfurts in Frankfurt, but I have tried them now in Friedrichshafen, where they go under the name of Rotwurst, and I can't say they're any nicer or more digestible than their Australian equivalents.

Started today at the Zeppelin museum in town, where they have an enormous collection of material related to lighter-than-air craft, including all the crashes -- very reassuring -- and the history of the airship. In particular they have a mock-up of the interior of the passenger areas of the Hindenburg, which are just astonishing -- like a cruise liner in the sky. They had a good deal of English signage, although the boring details were mainly in German, which was fine.

Got a bus then out to the Dornier Museum, in the old Dornier factory next to the airfield at the north-east end of town. There were only four of us on the bus, but the driver didn't stop at the museum but whizzed past to the next stop. Luckily it wasn't far to walk back. Dornier no longer make aircraft, having been absorbed into a larger entity, so the museum now has a complete record of their role in aviation history, including many full-sized planes and other items like target drones and helicopters. Once again the signage was pretty good, and the model aircraft themselves were extremely well-done, particularly the characteristic flying-boats from between the wars, some of them also very luxurious inside.

I could see the Zeppelin hangar on the other side of the airfield, and in fact I watched them land, but I wasn't sure how far it would be to walk around, so I took a bus back to town and had lunch before bussing out all over again to the Zeppelin hangar. I'm discovering that just because a German bus stop is labelled 'XYZ', it doesn't actually mean it's at XYZ, or even within sight of XYZ. This one was in the middle of nowhere, but there was a path that seemed to lead to some promising-looking buildings, so I followed that and eventually emerged at the Zeppelin building.

Here a nice lady at the check-in counter pointed out that my payment in January apparently hadn't gone through -- no reason why -- so I wasn't, in fact, booked on today's flight. Luckily I was able to get on to tomorrow's; but surely if someone's attempted to pay you and failed, you should notify them of that fact, not just write them off your books. It's far more important to be notified of failure than success.

Walked back to the apartment -- 45 minutes -- to drown my sorrows in a can of Hell, which I see from Wikipedia is a light clear beer popular in Munich, and now becoming trendy elsewhere. To me it seemed very thin stuff. Rested up for a while and then went for a walk along the lake to the east, or tried to; but apart from a few swampy and reedy sections the shoreline wasn't really visible at all. Once again Google Maps couldn't find my path, so I just wandered on for a while until I fond what looked like a good spot to turn around. I walked back along a bike path which was quite busy and occasionally shared by cars. It runs past some more allotments and a bed-and-breakfast place and is closely flanked by the railway line, so the allotments are quite long and narrow. One in particular had a name sign: 'Gerda's Rench'. I see Gerda as a kind of Bavarian Annie Oakley.

And so to bed.

Love, Jon.

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