Day 74 - Dobel - Oberderdingen
Trip Start
Apr 10, 2011
1
70
108
Trip End
Jul 25, 2011
Where I stayed
Wengerterstube & Gastezimmer Kern
Oberderdingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Despite having extended the lease on the car, the final stages of our time on the continent are still fairly rushed. However, our plans to begin our westwards trek towards Paris today were upset on Monday when we found the Mercedes museum in Stuttgart was closed. So we began today with a slight backtrack, as the museum is something Mike had on his wish list.
We arrived at the museum at about 11.30am and ended up spending 3 ½ hours there. It was surprisingly interesting. The tour began on the top floor and took you right back to the invention of the car, and each subsequent floor took you through the consecutive eras. Had it just been cars, then I would have lost interest by the ….. well by ½ way through the first floor if I'm honest, but each floor was put into context with the events in history at that time. It was the walk through history that made it particularly interesting for me. Mike loved it, as expected, and the girls just thought it was interesting at first but then it just became "car, truck, ambulance - wow, car, car, truck, car, convertible – wow!!"
We had a very late lunch at the museum, and then day dreamed amongst the sports cars in the showroom for a while, before we got back into the Peugeot and hit the road again. Mike had booked a place to stay in Oberderdingen for no other reason than it is a place on the map going in the right direction.
We arrived at about 5.30pm and found a very cute little guest house awaiting us. We always try to book places with WiFi access so we can book ahead at the next place, but even though this place supposedly had WiFi, we ended up wasting a lot of time, spending a matter of seconds online before we were thrown off again.
We headed up to a restaurant next door, which was in the style of a German beer hall, and served traditional German dishes – which loosely translated basically means 'meat and lots of it’. We struggled with the menu for quite some time, trying to use our European phrase book to help us out. In the end we just gave up and ordered 4 dishes. The girls both had bratwurst and sauerkraut, I had ½ a pig with a dumpling the size of a football in case that wasn’t enough and Mike had schnitzel and potatoes. The drinks don’t escape the bigger is better philosophy either, with Mikes beer being ½ litre and my wine supposed to be ¼ litre, but when it arrived it was well past the line on the glass, and the waitress was at risk of spilling it.
We did our best to get through the drinks, and so as not to be rude, we decided to have another. Unfortunately after not having had any meat to speak of for the past couple of months, our digestive systems decided to protest the intake of the past couple of days, and Mike & I both had a restless night feeling really full and uncomfortable.
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