Germany Day 60 - Saturday, March 7 - 17 days to go

Had a nice breakfast in the 4 star restaurant. German breakfast are usually a buffet with cold-cuts, cheese, and sausage (basically hot dogs). This was a bit fancier with actual scrambled eggs. Yum!

Next I finished my tour of the castle using up a bunch more electronic film. Plan is to try to create panoramas when I get back home.

Next up: drive to Baden-Baden for a spa/super sauna. Originally I was going to find a hotel while at Berg Hornberg, but there was no Internet access so I was winging it this time.

First technique to find a hotel I tried was to find a hot-spot and use my laptop. But it turned out to be too big and heavy to drag in, but I did find a hot-spot at on of the Autobahn's service centers. While that did work, I didn't manage to pick out a hotel before I got to Baden-Baden.

Got to Baden-Baden broke (Berg Hornberg was expensive) so first stop was the Geld Automat (ATM). Stock up on cash, next I had to find the spa - the one I wanted was the more traditional Friedrichsbad. This is a 17 step 3 hour process, nude of course, with only the last few steps being mixed.

Got there just before lunch and checked to see if you need reservations (you don't). Then I had to find someplace for lunch. A very quaint looking place was serving "original Lowenbrau" beer. Well, it turned out to be The Lowenbrau - and was very nice. Ran out of film here again, darn. (The meal was the last picture on the memory stick.)

Here they keep up Bayern (Bavaria) traditions - the waiters were in lederhosen and the waitresses in traditional Bayern dresses. Very nice.

The Lowenbrau

My Meal

The Germans have definitely cut way back on smoking. You basically can't smoke much of anywheres indoors. At the Lowenbrau I plopped down at the first place I could find which was nice and bright and an enclosed outdoor area. It also turned out to be the smoking section. This did not bother me because none of the Germans were smoking! (There were only about three other groups at the time.)

Refreshed with lunch, off to the spa. Locker rooms in Germany are very nice. You put your entrance card in the locker to remove your locker key (you need the entrance card to get out). The key has a bracelet you tie around your wrist - very effective considering you have no pockets to put anything!

Friedrichsbad

The attendants make sure you have your towel/sheet and start you off with the first stage - a five minute shower with a shower head as big as a basketball. All clean, next two stages are quite time lying down in hot and really hot sauna rooms. A half-hour or so later you are off to the next stage...

Which is a bath/massage. You lie down on your sheet and this dude scrubs you with a brush and then lathers you up and massages with the soap. Very nice once you get past the dude in the white outfit doing all this. Before and after you shower - right in front of the attendants. Leave your modesty at the door. (It's weird showering with clothed fellas right there, but OK, it's their job.)

Next a couple of steam rooms (hot and really hot) and then, well, I forgot all the stages. Finally, you wind up in a luke warm pool where the girls catch up, then a warmer pool about 2 feet deep you soak in, then a really cool pool I spent about 5 minutes in. That final pool is in a huge circular room with an ornate ceiling and round skylight.

Then back to same sex for the exit spa steps - I don't exactly remember, but there was one really COLD pool at the end I only got my feet into. Then there is the cream step where you put lotion on yourself, then off to the sleep room. They lay out a sheet, you lay down, and then they wrap you up snugly. After all that, you can't help but to doze off. The final stage was a reading room which I skipped being as I can't read (German).

Exiting Friedrichsbad, the large modern pool building next door had some excitement - the fire trucks came screaming up. After a couple of minutes of organization, they took in a basket (well, I don't really know what to call it) of hose - so it appears there was a real fire. I didn't see anyone running out and they were still letting folks in, so I'm thinking maybe a grease fire in the kitchen. So after deciding there was not much to watch here, I left.

At the end of all of this it's about 4pm so I decide that since my friend Chris couldn't meet me here to go to the Porsche museum (he's a Porsche lover), I'd just have to go for him. So I hot footed it over to Stuttgart (about an hours drive) and started looking for a hotel.

I didn't have much luck with finding a hot-spot, so I switched tactics. The technique to find a hotel was to use the nav system in the car to find the museum, then ask it for nearby hotels. Could have worked better (first one was out of business), but eventually I was at a Holiday Inn.

Germany is a "green" country - at the Holiday Inn the roof over the reception area was covered in grass. I also some of the Mercedes buildings with the same feature. I don't recall ever seeing that in the US. I meant to take a picture, but it was dusk and I remember the next day - five miles down the road. :-(

Being tired by this time, I ate at the hotel and crashed for the night. Only interesting thing here was that the Weißbier at the hotel sorta tasted like banana to me. Kinda interesting.