Needless to say that when we awoke in the morning and the curtains were drawn back you had a perfect view of the grey skies and pouring rain, brilliant just what we needed. We originally planned to go to a place called Ingolstadt and then work our way down the Blue Danube (only it wasn't blue when we saw it) but in view of the weather we found a place on the map called ironically RAIN and so we said we must go there and from there work east to Ulm and then north to Stuttgart.
Being a Sunday there were obviously lots of events taking place from street markets, to cycle day outs, road works and closed roads and so our journey did not go quite to plan as it was not possible to follow the river all the way but we did our best. So driving thro the countryside was quite nice with rolling hills and cattle and also Vineyards and hops being grown and also with lots of agriculture especially fruit trees. We arrived in what we thought would be a small town and blow me-us there was a large Airbus Factory there just outside of Rain in a town called Donauwörth and upon investigation this is the main Helicopter and Training site.
We then arrived in Rain where the main road was blocked for a market day and so we disobeyed the SATNAV and turned up a side road the after about half a minute it gave us a new route avoiding the market. From there we headed alongside, not literally, in the direction of Ulm and after a short while came across a sign which said Parc und Ride and there were loads of cars and many, many people on bikes and then out of the blue to self made bikes disguised at mini cars turned up, see photo. Avoiding all the wobbling bikers going two and three abreast but we finally made it out of town but there must have been several hundred bikers as there were marker points with stewards and medical help in places.
Eventually early afternoon we arrived in Ulm which is quite a large city where we planned to stop and look around the old town or at least do a drive thro subject to weather and as we got to the old part of town there must have been an incident of some type as their police everywhere with cars and pedestrians refused entry, what's going on??? so considering all the weather we had experienced and this making it a more tiring drive we decided that we needed to change our plans as we could not see the old city and so head for our Hotel in Stuttgart and we would use the motorway being the fastest according to the SATNAV rather than the slower main roads. So off we went and and joined the A8 Autobahn and after about ten miles the overhead motorway light started to show problems and the satnav was saying rerouting due incident and so suddenly us, and few others, got of the motorway and drove thro the countryside for about half an hour then it put us back on the autobahn. I did mention to Jennifer that there is a place called AUSFAHRT which appears on many signs on the road so must be a big town.
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We arrived on the outskirts of Stuttgart and located our Hotel which is right by the Mercedes Stadium and checked in.
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For dinner we went to the Hotel restaurant for a beer and burger and then to room to watch some TV. Tomorrow we plan to to do a bus tour but subject to Noel recovering from his last two days of bowel issues as too many hours sitting in the car with not enough exercise is not great.
