What a schermozzle!
The plan for today was a leisurely 3-hour drive from the
town of Schaffhauser to Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany. Things started well
enough, and I crossed the border at Thaygun without realising that I’d crossed
it – I think I’ve watched too much US-Mexico border security type TV because
not only were there not sniffer dogs and herds of police, there was no one at
all – no one to stop me, no one to check my passport. So as far as I know I’m
now an illegal alien in Germany.
Anyway, thanks to Google Maps chewing through all the data I
bought yesterday and throwing fifty fits, I then spent the next few hours
getting lost, even after I finally gave up on technology and bought a hard copy
map (the scale on the only map I was able to lay hands on is so large? Small?
Whatever it is that means you don’t see very much detail, just the big-picture
stuff). I was, at long last, literally back on the right road when I noticed
that the car was throwing up a message saying that the oil temperature was 97
degrees. Having considerable experience with a little old car that overheated
almost as soon as you turned it on, I panicked and pulled over to let it cool
down for a while (don’t laugh at me, people who actually know something
about cars besides how to turn them on). Hoping it was just a momentary glitch,
I started ‘er up again, only to have the temperature skyrocket in a few
minutes. Fortunately a roadside stop showed up and I gratefully pulled in,
relieved to be off the autobahn.
Now this was annoying enough – but because my phone had
chewed through all its credit, and I wasn’t able to connect my laptop to the
internet (Optus Roaming my foot), I ended up having to ask a couple of people
if they spoke English. Luck was in, and a kind man from the Netherlands called
Theo not only lent me his phone and helped interpret for the Swiss Europcar
people, whose English wasn’t so great, but had a look at the car to see if he
could find the problem, tried to help me get some data on my phone and hung around
for a while for a bit of a chat. THANK YOU Theo, hope you are enjoying your
cycling trip in Austria!!
Finally the tow truck arrived and myself and my car were
bundled off to the nearest Volkswagen dealership where they found ... no
problem at all. I must have accidentally hit some button I didn’t know existed
which caused the oil temperature to display. I’d never heard of such a button,
or the display of oil temperature before, and had thought that because it had
suddenly started showing up on the main console of the car, it must be a
warning. I felt such a fool, and the smirks of the girls behind the desks
didn’t help. However I got out of the place holding tightly to the last few
shreds of my dignity, and once safely back on the autobahn had a little bit of
a cry, feeling not so much an adventurer as an idiot who took on too big a job
and now isn’t going to be able to pull this trip off ...
But you see this is the thing about adventuring, even the
kind of fairly easy, unadventurous adventuring I like to do – I don’t think
it’s about being brave all the time, or feeling confident all the time – it’s
having moments like that where you feel like you’ve failed, or are failing,
where you doubt yourself and your ability to achieve what you’ve set out to do,
and have a little cry about it. And then you pick yourself up, dust yourself
off, insert some starch into your upper lip, reassure yourself that such times
(both car “breakdowns” and subsequent weepies) are part of the journey that
you’ve set out to achieve, and get on with it.
And boy was this trip worth getting on with – because 20
minutes further down the autobahn I was getting teary because I’d reached the
area surrounding Fussen and I’d never seen a place so beautiful in all my life,
and was so glad that I had come.
Fussen itself is a town whose oldest parts date back to the
1200s, and is nestled at the heart of some magnificent, gothic mountains whose
sharp peaks and spires seem to be competing to reach the sky. It’s most famous
for the two castles which are cradled in the lower reaches of the mountains,
just a few kilometres from it, but its old buildings and ancient city walls
would make it a destination in its own right in any other part of the world. On
the side of the town which isn’t pressed up against the mountains it sits
beside green fields with wildflowers in them, and soft little cows with
cowbells around their necks, and a vast, quiet lake. It would be hard to
imagine a more perfect location for any town.
After a walk around Fussen, I drove out to see if I could
spy the castles (I could), before finding a place to camp for the night. The
problem I’m having on this trip isn’t so much finding a place to camp, but
finding one which doesn’t have herds of people doing exactly the same thing I
am. I found one such spot, beside the lake on the one hand and the mountains on
the other, cooked a beautiful hot dinner, went for a walk through the fields to
the lake and a little way along the shore (Fussen is obviously a very popular
holiday spot locally – every man and his dog (literally, everyone seems to
bring their dog on holiday with them here) was out going for a peaceful evening
walk too), before going to bed.
