'Moose'

Weekend Wanders
June-July 1998

We've been doing a bit of day-tripping in the last month or so. We went for a weekend trip to the smallest country in the world, Liechtenstein, for starters. Liechstenstein is barely 150 square kilometers in size and boasts its own royal family! It's also smack bang in the middle of the Swiss/Austrian Alps. We stayed the night in Vaduz in a very civilised camping ground (they even sell beer and wine) where we drank and watched the sun go down behind the surrounding mountains.

The next day we drove aimlessly up one of the nearby mountains. Boy do those roads get steep! At one point we had stopped to take a look at the view and the poor old Morrie struggled REAL HARD to get any speed up the hill again. It was definitely a slow first gear climb from then on!

Back in the lowlands, and on another weekend, we took a day trip around to the Swiss side of Lake Constance, and visited the town of St Gallen, Switzerland. This is a real nice little place, lots of old buildings and an amazing church! The interior has to be seen - photos don't do it justice!

Another weekend and another village, we found by chance (not that we could have missed it!) the most perfect-looking what-a-castle-SHOULD-look-like castle that I have seen. Hohenzollern Castle stands at the top of a large hill, overlooking the surrounding countryside with a silhouette that is pure medieval Knights of the Round Table. Monty Python should have filmed here.

The Porsche and Mercedes Museums in Stuttgart were another weekend trip. Both are really hard to find but for different reasons. Unfortunately the Porsche Museum has been undergoing a refurbishment and only a tiny part of the collection was available to view. And all the signs telling you where it is had been taken down. Luckily we knew it was on Porsche Street.

The Mercedes Museum was hard to find simply because the entire area is ALL Mercedes - you can't just follow the little Merc logos and expect to find the Museum - we tried that and ended up in the service department! I don't think I could have convinced the mechanics that Moose was a Merc in disguise. By the way, the Mercedes Museum was fantastic. It's a 'Must See' in Stuttgart. It's also free.

Mount Santis in the Swiss Alps is a pretty awesome place. 2500 metres high, the viewpoint on Santis looks out across the surrounding peaks of the Swiss Alps, and down into lowland Switzerland towards St Gallen. Unfortunately, it was a bit cloudy up there that day, the view was cut down to about 1 kilometre, but it was still well worth the drive up there. Mount Santis cows are real friendly.

Below, there's also a few pics of the local area around our village of Uberuhldingen, Bodensee, Germany, including the forest around Heilegenburg and the view over Lake Constance to the Swiss Alps.