I’m doing Germany End to End. South to north, Austrian border to Danish. Specifically, from Füssen, home of that Disneyland castle; to Sylt, the North Sea island where the country’s celebs hang out. I’m mainly following the D9 Route, along the Romantic Road and then the Weser. Beer and sausages may be involved.
I spent two days getting here by train, via Hamburg (where I picked up my bike from long-term storage since I left it after my Denmark trip in spring) and Munich. A morning train today got me to Füssen.
It’s not quite the southernmost point of Germany (which is in uncyclable mountains south of Oberstdorf) but is on the Austrian border, and is the start (or end) of the Romantic Road. So here I was, starting my End to End by the Bundesrepublik Deutschland sign somewhere around ten o’clock.
Füssen is a heavily-touristed honeypot town that could be a Disney animation. Particularly because, just outside at Hohenschwangau, is Mad ‘King’ Ludwig’s Castle Neuschwanstein, which served as the model for the company’s title cards. It’s so popular with Japanese visitors that the signboard is in katakana and kanji.
It was also popular with composer Richard Wagner, especially thanks to Ludwig’s financial backing. Without Ludwig we may never have had Bayreuth, never had all those six-hour-long heavyweight operas. He has a lot to answer for.
The weather was glorious, sunny and hot. There were millions of fellow cycle tourists, some with dogs in baskets, many cautiously apparelled in scarves and coats, but all on e-bikes. I was the only one on an exclusively coffee-powered machine.
And I didn’t really miss the electric assistance: the alps may fringe the horizon, but from here north it’s almost all flat.
German bike paths are excellent. Wide, smooth, open, well-signed, car-free. The going was delightful all day. I had a sandwich for lunch in Schongau’s square and saw a black squirrel on the town’s edge.
But a bit further on, at Hohenfurch, I had a bigger surprise: in somebody’s garden, the biggest and fun-est domestic model railway I have ever seen.
It was the size of a badminton court, and must have over a thousand human models in its exuberant portrayal of a bustling German railway town. There’s a wedding, there’s swimmers, there are markets and shops and sports.
And of course, being Germany, there’s a nudist area, with textile-free people enjoying the sunshine.
The owners are Karlheinz and Roswitha Dörner. Karlheinz was a railway engineer in the old East Germany, and after the couple moved here and retired, they built up their remarkable garden display. Rain, apparently, poses no threat to the models, though wind does. They were very friendly and keen to let me spend time admiring their remarkable work.
After Epfach came a monster climb I wasn’t expecting, but there was a satisfactorily reward of sunny view from the top. There were lots and lots of farmland bike paths, and lots and lots of cyclists coming mainly the other way: maybe a thousand today. Of which about 999 e-bikes, then.
Eventually I took a road down to a riverside gravel path and crunched happily along the blue waters of the Lech to Landsberg. Up a forest track was a pleasant little campsite where €13 bought me a spot next to woman with dog in trailer, amid other cycle campers. I wrote postcards over a litre of beer in the campsite beer garden and felt happy. A good way to start my trans-German odyssey.
Miles today: 50
Miles from Füssen: 49