Hear about traveling to Lake Constance (Bodensee) in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland as the Amateur Traveler discusses a biking trip around the lake to explore its historic, cultural, and natural sites.
The Lake Constance International Tourism Board sponsored this trip.
This week’s show is supported by the new Smart Travel Podcast. Travel smarter — and spend less — with help from NerdWallet. Check out Smart Travel here. (https://travel-in-10.captivate.fm/smart-travel-for-the-amateur-traveller)
Day 1 – Arrival in Constance, Germany
• Flew into Zurich, train to Constance.
• Quick city tour: Roman history dating back to Caesar Augustus, Council of Constance (resolved the Papal Schism).
• Began biking to Reichenau Island (UNESCO World Heritage Site): monasteries, vineyards, Romanesque churches, small museum of monastic culture.
• Dinner on Reichenau, returned by boat to Constance.
• Overnight: Hotel Constantia.
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https://amateurtraveler.com/lake-constance-bike-trip/
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I don’t know if Lake Constance is on your radar, but I’m going to make an argument here that it really should be. I thought it was just an amazing destination. You don’t have to do biking. We’ll talk about that later, even though that’s what I was doing. And even though it’s a great place to do that, but it’s an area just north of the Alps, really on the border of these three countries and it is a both a beautiful area as well as an amazingly historic area and so there’s quite a lot of culture and history there and so it makes it a place worth seeing. On this roughly week-long itinerary, I visited three different UNESCO World Heritage sites as well as a number of other sites that are absolutely worth visiting. The PR rep for the tourism board is somebody I know, a friend who I’ve gone on a trip with her before. If you go back in the archives for Amateur Traveler for the 200th anniversary of the bicycle, she and I and a handful of great writers did a trip to Boden Vertonberg before the pandemic. And Victoria, who’s the PR rep, pitched me this because one, she knew that I did like biking. And this is a very well-known biking route within Germany. And it’s a well-known destination within Germany and in the surrounding areas, but not as well known to Americans, and it really ought to be. It really deserves to be. So, this trip was about a week-l long trip. I flew out Monday morning from San Francisco and was back in San Francisco Sunday night. So I flew into Zurich. So you’re relatively close to Zurich as you’re in Lake Constance. I would tell you I was a little leerary of the itinerary at this part of the trip because I actually got off a plane onto a train actually at the airport and went up to Lake Constance and Adea broughtwurst with a tour guide who showed me around for just a very quick visit of the city of Constance and then I got on a bike and this isn’t something that I would recommend for you. I would recommend you take a night in Constance for one because Constance itself is a city worth spending more time in than I was able to on this trip. So this is a city that goes back the Roman presence there to Caesar Augustus. So I think it’s the year 40 AD. So it is a very old area and civilization and the presence of people in this area go back to the stone age and we’ll talk more about that in a bit. Probably one of the most significant things that happened in Constance over those oh so many years was the Council of Constants. And you may or may not have heard of this, but if you’re Roman Catholic, this would be the place where the schism where there were the time period in the 1400s when there were two popes is resolved and the papacy is restored to one and only one pope at a time. Thank you very much. If you’re Protestant, that is also actually the council that is going to condemn John Husse out of Prague. So if you’ve been in Prague and you’ve seen that statue there to John H, he was condemned here at the same council. And the building that that all happened in was a big warehouse that was built for storing goods that were traveling on the lake. The lake was used for moving goods for millennia because it was a whole lot easier than using roads. It’s about a 60 kilometer long lake, just long enough you can’t see one end to the other because the curvature of the earth. But Constance was a significant city because of the commerce on the lake. And so that was this big warehouse here. And so that was what was used for this large conclave that brought in many many churchmen and nobles and to solve some very thorny issues there in the 1400s. There’s still a number of old beautiful buildings in Constance. One of the old towers is still there and some of the old defensive towers also along the lake. But again, I didn’t get a whole lot of chance to do that because I got on a bike and went to the first UNESCO site that I went to and that is the island of Reichano. And Reichanau was a early monastic presence in the area. There were three large monasteries that were in Reichana. And it will keep coming up in this story because this is also what brings vineyards for the first time to this region. And if you’re traveling around this region, you will see vineyards everywhere. And they came through this island of Reicho. So I quickly got on a train with a bike. And the with a bike part is kind of significant because as I was going up to this trip, the big question was, did I want to rent an ebike or did I want to rent a regular bike? And obviously the advantages of an ebike is when you’re going up those hills, that extra power is very helpful. But the advantages of another bike is it’s a lot less heavy. And in the train station in Constance, the track I needed to get to, you could only get to by stairs apparently. And so the tour guide who they’d sent to help me helped me get the bike up the stairs. But that bike is really heavy. I was nicknaming it the beast in my head. But I think that was really the one time that it was a disadvantage to have an ebike. And there were definitely hills that I was doing that made it very convenient on this trip. About four stops down from the main train station to the Reichanau train station and then biked out a causeway to the island of Rakanau. You can’t go in the three main churches that are still out there in the island. The churches of St. Mary and Mark, St. George, and St. Peter and Paul. And these are all Roman-esque churches. And the Benedicting monastery that was established here dates back to 724. I didn’t say how old that was, but you can bike around and see some of those. One of them, for instance, was sitting in a field of wild flowers. It was quite pretty. And see the the boat docks. And there’s also a lot of green houses on the island. This is a real source for tomatoes and other fruit grown in green houses for the area. In the middle of the island, there is a museum that has some of the many illustrated books that were created on the island of Reichano by the monks of Reichano. And that museum also talks about the monastic experience and the history of the island a bit. Not a large museum. I can say you could probably see it in about half an hour, but worth a stop. I had dinner in the island at the Strand Hotel Lochner House and then got on a boat. And one of the interesting things about Lake Constance is while I was visiting it on a bike, you also could visit many of the spots that I’m talking about by boat and there’s regular ferry service around the lake. If you look at a map, you’ll find the island of Reichenau off in a another corner of the lake as it were. And I got back to Constance via the boat because it would have been dark by the time I was biking back and that path wasn’t well lit. So they put me on the boat instead. But it’s a beautiful scenery to go around these many little towns along the lake here as you’re heading back to Constance. I stayed that night in the Hotel Constantia. I’ll be writing up hotel reviews on every place I stayed. All lovely. One thing that stuck out from the Hotel Constansia was it was one of the first times that I’ve had cheesecake in the breakfast buffet. The next day I headed out along the cycle path. The trip to Reicho is not technically on the official Lake Constant cycle path, but it’s commonly included because it is a significant site. But the whole path is about 270 km or 170 mi. I did not bike the entire route. Most people ride it in 5 to 7 days. If you do the lefthand part of the lake, that’s a little more hilly than some of the parts that I did. So, we had skipped some of that. And then there are so much to see that I unless you were just wanting to ride, I would try and add time into your schedule, a little more time than I took so that there’s time to also just just sit at a cafe in a beautiful medieval town and have some of this downtime as well, which my trip did not have. I just left my luggage at the hotel and then there’s a service called Radvegg Ryzen that will for I think it’s €17 move your luggage to your next hotel. And so that is actually also where the bike came from. The bike rental was from that organization as well. Put links in the show notes. But so I’m not taking my luggage with me. It is always meeting me at my next hotel. My first stop was the island of Mina now on day two. And that is known as the flower island. And this is an island. It’s about a half hour bike ride from Constance along the lake. It was actually founded by the Tutonic Knights. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the Tutonic Knights, but they were a monastic order of soldiers. I know them more for being up in the area of Prussia than for being down in this area. But they founded this island in the 1300s, built a castle and a church there. But a big change happened all throughout this area in the early 18th century. So in 1803, Napoleon has taken over Europe and he has taken the lands of what were the Holy Roman Empire that are west of the Rine. And when one of the last laws of the Holy Roman Empire in the imperial recess or the secularization, church lands were taken and redistributed to the nobles who had lost their lands to Napoleon. And so all throughout this region, many of the monasteries were closed, the abbies, the bishop bricks, you had prince bishops at the time and their power, their secular power was taken away from them, their lands, their vineyards, their castles. And this island was taken away from the Tutonic Knights and given as much of this area was to the Grand Dukes of Boden. This is in the region of Boden, Vertonberg. And so the winners in this big secularization were the Dukes and the loser was the church. And this will come up as a theme throughout this trip. One of the Grand Dukes in the 1800s transforms by now into a botanical gardens and it’s a gorgeous set of gardens. And if you go in the spring, summer, or fall, you will find displays of appropriate seasonal flowers. So, it’s just a very beautiful island. But in the springtime, you’ll see tulips. And in fall, September when I was there, you there were still roses in bloom. But there were also 12,000 different dalia plants and a variety of colors and just a stunning amount of varieties. The island also has a surprising number of redwood trees. And there are three types of redwood trees in the world. There are the sequoia redwoods and the coastal redwoods from California. And then there’s also the redwoods from China. And these are the ones that you’d find in the island of Mina. And they were planted there in the 1800s. But there’s this lovely avenue of tall redwood trees that you walk through to get to the entrance of the island. These were planted after 1940 when these trees were rediscovered in China. They were thought to be extinct before that. But the Chinese redwoods, the dawn redwoods as they’re known, are unusual because even though they have needles, they lose their needles in the fall like a deciduous tree. But there are gardens, there are exhibits on my now in terms of how you can arrange your own gardens. There are waterfalls with gardens in them. There’s the original church and the buildings of the palace up there that you can visit. There are vineyards. There are some intentionally Instagrammable spots like a big flower dress that you can get behind as if you were wearing it in your photos. There are also green houses including they were undergoing a change in the palm greenhouse to do a temporary exhibit on chili peppers. So, a beautiful island. You can get an English-sp speakaking tour. I had a wonderful English-speaking tour guide who gave me a tour of the island and you can arrange that as well. There’s also a butterfly greenhouse and numerous different coffee houses and restaurants. I actually ate lunch on the island, including one project that is done to help troubled youths basically adjust to regular life. So, some good things happening on the island of Mina. It’s a big project. They have 50 gardeners all year long and even more in high season and they get 800 to a million visitors a year. From there, I got back on the bike and headed up to take a boat. So, I took a shortcut and did not go all the way to the western end of the lake, but instead I was supposed to take a boat over to Unulingan. And I say I was supposed to because I got to the boat dock a little ahead of schedule up there in Dingledorf and I confused my unigan with my Uber Lingan and got on the wrong boat and so I biked about a half an hour further than I needed. It’s mostly flat as you’re biking around the lake and since I was a half hour early I got to uning on time and bike past some pretty scenery between the two towns. If you’re looking for a way to travel that feels personal, comfortable, and connected, but without the price tags and sterile feeling of hotels or short-term rentals, let me introduce you to Kindred. 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That’s live k i n d.com code traveler. livekindred.com code traveler. And thanks to Kindred for sponsoring this episode of Amateur Traveler. Oh, the car from Carvana is here. Wow. Will you look at that? It’s exactly what I ordered. Like precisely. It would be crazy if there were any catches, but there aren’t. Right. Right. Because that’s how car buying should be. With Carvana, you get the car you want. Choose delivery or pickup and a week to love it or return it. Buy your car today with Carvana. Delivery or pickup fees may apply. Limitations and exclusions may apply. See our 7-day return policy at carvana.com. This was one of the highlights of the trip for me because there’s another UNESCO World Heritage site. This is a multinational site. We’ve talked about it on the show before in regard to Switzerland, but it’s part of the prehistoric pile dwellings around the Alps UNESCO site. So, these are stilt house settlements that date from 5,000 to 500 BC. So, these date from the late stone age into and through the Bronze Age. Then they’re very significant archaeologically because we know so much more about these civilizations than we would if it hadn’t been for these pile dwellings because since they were built on or near the lake, there were a lot of wood that was down below the mud and was preserved. And so there’s a lot of things that were uncovered from both the Stone Age and the Bronze Age civilizations through these different settlements, number of different settlements around Europe. And so they’re very significant. But if you go to Unligan and you go to the actual UNESCO site, you can look out on the water and you will see nothing. There’s they built a outline of a house on a dock and there’s really just nothing to see because the actual site is below the water line and what you would see if you went into the lake and you were scubing is the tops of the piles is all you would see about a thousand different piles from where the houses rested. So what they did to make that more accessible is in unlan they have the farbotan museum that’s the pile dwelling museum and so what they started doing about a hundred years ago is they made recreations of these pile dwellings as they understood them at time. Now later on they got more understanding of what their life was like, what the buildings were like as they discovered more things. For instance, they know what the houses looked like because they would discover clay versions of what the houses looked like or they would actually discover pieces of doors and roofs and beams and those sort of things. And so they were actually as time went along able to get a better picture. So rather than tear down the first version of the pile dwellings, they would build a second version and a third and a fourth. And so there are multiple different recreations in this one museum. And that gave them the ability to say, well, this is what we thought it looked like originally where we thought it was out on the lake. And then slowly you’ll see these reconstructions move closer to the shore as they realize they weren’t necessarily built on the lake, but they were built because the lake changes its level as it goes through the year. It still does as the snow melts and as water gets used for agriculture and things like that. And so they were actually built closer to the shore than they originally thought. And they know more about what implements they used. So they’ve got one, for instance, set of dwellings where they just have stone age tools. They have one of the other ones where they just have the bronze age tools. And it’s fascinating to see. And so they’ll have in the stone age tools, for instance, they’ll show you how you can use a a drill to drill a hole through a stone using only stone and sand and wood. Do you don’t have metal tools yet? How are you going to drill a hole through a stone so that you can make a stone axe? And what they did is they would use a bow drill. So they would have a stick and below the stick they’d put sand that’s going to be abrasive and then they would rotate that stick with a bow. They would wrap the string around that stick and move it back and forth with a bow to make something that you can drill a hole through stone. It’s going to take you a long time. Granted, it’s not efficient, but it’s possible. And so, because they had the wood was preserved in the mud below these dwellings, you could actually hold a wooden handle of a stone tool that was made as a copy of something they found in the lake. And so it’s fascinating to see what they know about the Stone Age Society and then later on the Bronze Age Society. So I thoroughly enjoyed that museum and it’s so much more it’s such a much more interesting site because of this museum than it would be if you just were looking out on the lake for instance. It would be still archaeologically significant but not interesting to see. And they have a tiny museum section. you’re not allowed to take pictures inside that has implements that they found inside and then they have this recreation section and you can easily spend a couple hours in this area and there were signs generally available in English as I recall. There’s one section that’s interesting where they built one of the recreations during the period in Germany when it was the Nazis were in power. It’s got an outer wall and it has guard towers. And they said that was because they were trying to convey this sense of the powerful nation of the German state. And they said the guard towers are fanciful. They really have found no evidence they ever had guard towers, but the outer wall was something that they did find in some of these villages. So because probably they were built for access to trade on the lake, they were built close to the fishing and they would also be built probably on the water or near the water for protection up there on the piles. So fascinating place, really a highlight of the trip for me there in Unuligan. If you’re traveling with kids, I think you’ll enjoy that there’s a playground outside the recreation of the pile dwellings that is built to look the same. It’s built to look like pile dwellings. It’s pretty cool. And that was day two. I stayed there in unligen right near the UNESCO site. Ridden one of the hotels on the water and ate in a restaurant also very near there. And then the next day I got on my bike and this was the day that I was biking up away from the lake. So now I’m off of the official bike path but I’m seeing some of the things in the area. And so first I biked back a little towards Uber Lingan and went to the Basilica Bernau. And this is a Baroque church that used to be part of a Cistersian monastery. The Cistersians, the white monks. It is a beautiful church. Uh this is one that as I was biking in that half hour that I shouldn’t have had to do the day before, I stopped and took pictures of this church from down the hill over the vineyards because it was quite picturesque. And so it was interesting to bike back to and explore the church inside on the next day. and also the view of the lake from the church because it’s up on the hill a little bit. And then I had the section of the church that I was most glad to have the ebike because they had me biking into the hills up away from the lake to the Salem monastery and castle. I say monastery and castle. was a very large monastery that was again a cistersian monastery until again the secularization until the time that it was given over to the Boden Vertenberg family and became a castle and so it’s interesting because obviously as a monastery it would be very plain and so you see the dorm rooms and they’re fairly plain but as it became a castle they would paint on lentils and more fancy window decorations onto the all as if they were part of the architecture of the original building. There’s a church there within the monastery obviously. And then there’s a museum, monastery museum. I did not get an English- speakaking tour there. I did go with one of the tourism reps, but she didn’t know much more about the area than I did. So, it would be good to get an English speaking tour. You’d probably get more out of it than I did. But they have a museum there dedicated to firefighting. And one of the reasons for that is there was a large fire in many of these places but in this monastery at one time. And so it is an appropriate place to talk about the history of firefighting. And so some of the local fire equipment was actually made by people who were originally bell manufacturers in some of the nearby cities. And so they talk about the history of volunteer firefighters and and the equipment and they have different generations of equipment there both in a dedicated museum as well as in part of another exhibit in the main museum area. So it was interesting visit. Probably would have gotten more out of it with an English speaking tour. There’s also a small brewery museum. That information was all in German as well well as a brewery and cafe. And there’s actually a school that has been in place there for hundreds of years since the secularization. Then after lunch in a nearby town, I biked to Mirsburg and Mirsburg. This was a very busy afternoon because I’m biking from eating at uh Langghast House Paradis and had a wonderful dessert there. And of course, the dessert set me back in time. And I had three different museums I was supposed to see in Mirsburg. And so I was running late for the rest of the afternoon. This is definitely one of those days where there was too much crammed into it. You should not try to do this all in one day. And Mirsburg is a beautiful old medieval town up on a hill. Sadly, they had me park my bike at the top of the hill even though my hotel was at the bottom of the hill. So, I pushed my bike up the hill because you weren’t supposed to ride it. And I had to push it all the way back down the hill to go to the hotel that I was staying at there because I stayed overnight in in Mirsburg right on the water there. But the first museum I went to is the Bible Gallery. And so this is a museum about the Bible and it’s seems like it was mostly intended to introduce for instance school children to the Bible who have grown up in a secular society and might not know much about it. And so there was a section where you could sit in a tent like Abraham sat in and learn about the Old Testament way of life and what they eat and what life would be like there. And there were other segments where you could see where the Bible would be used in literature. You know how many things that you know or quotes or books or movies are using stories from the Bible. And so an interesting small museum only spent about half hour there. Little rushed. You could probably spend more time than that. I did get an English-speaking tour of the museum which made it more interesting. And it is a museum that really is has a lot of information for kids as well including interactive activities that they can do and it’s in an old monastery or old nunnery actually I believe which uh probably again was abandoned in the secularization. And then I went to the Väam Boden. This is the wine museum. And there are tasting in the wine museum, but you have to do the museum first. And again, you can get an English speaking tour. I had one. It was about an hour and a half that I spent at that museum. Probably that’s a little on the long side. It would be good to let them know how much time you have in your schedule because they’re very excited about wine. But there were some interesting things there like they had wines from all over the world including places you wouldn’t think had wine places like Turkey in the Middle East and Muslim countries as well as Asian countries and such. So that was an interesting exhibit. And then they had a place where you could smell different flavors that you might taste in wine. When you’re handed a wine, you’re doing a wine tasting and that’s always the well we get the hint of cassiss or we get licorice or leather or something like that. They had basically a room that all bottles of this. This whole wine museum is in a historic building. In this case, it was an old I don’t know any other way of saying this, but it’s a retirement house, which would be very unusual in the Middle Ages, but if you had a good amount of money and you got to the point where you needed some help, you could move in here and have a room or two and have someone who could help you. So, it really was a retirement center sort of uh in the medieval form of it. The most famous person who had lived here is Dr. Mesmer from whom we get Mesmerized who was one of the early people involved in hypnotism and using it in healthcare and then you can do a tasting then later on there’s a very large wine press that is still workable I understand as you walk into there and behind there there is a wine dispensing museum you can get your card and go over and get taste of local wines the most famous of the local wines is Müller Turgau and this is a white wine uh slightly aromatic white wine, floral notes, mild acidity. It’s not that dissimilar from a relingling which is popular in the area as well. It has an interesting history though which they document on the second floor of the museum. Originally most of the vineyards in this area until 1803 were actually associated with monasteries or were owned by the church. But after the secularization they went over to the Ducal families and even to this day the largest wine grower in this region is the government of Boden Vvertonberg which is very different to what I’m used to. When the grape Müller Toga was developed, developed in 1882 by a professor Müller who was in nearby Switzerland just over the border from Constance in Germany. Somebody wanted to grow that grape in this area, but the nobility who owned the land, the who had who set the rules did not want that grape grown. And so the whole second floor is talking about this experience of smuggling the vines in from nearby Switzerland into this region and where they obviously became much more popular later on. But it all starts with a crime and smuggling was apparently something that was widespread at the time in the area across the lake. And so that’s an interesting exhibit. They also have exhibits there that talk about wine in religion and then also wine in fun. There’s one exhibit that is a series of photographs done by a Brazilian photographer of friends of his. And there’s the picture after one glass of wine, the picture of the same person after two glasses of wine, and the pictures of the person after three glasses of wine. And you can probably envision the differences that happen in these people that are documented in this exhibit. But interesting museum. But then I think my favorite of the three museums I visited might be the castle, the schllo. And it is again started as a castle for the prince bishop. the prince bishop from Constance who got kicked out of Constance because of the reformation basically being close to Zurich. The Protestants became in charge of the city. So he went over to the other side of the lake. And so this was the castle of the prince bishop in the medieval times. And then again in the secularization it goes over and be and becomes owned by the nobles. And then one of the nobles basically takes this castle and turns it into the museum it is today and preserves different parts of the castle at different ages. So you can walk into this part of the castle and see what it would be like to be in a medieval castle and then go into another part of the castle and you can see much more what it would be like in the 1800s or so. And it looked like a very small castle on the outside. I had an English speaking tour again and there kept being more and more rooms and there kept being, you know, here’s the cafe, here’s the dungeon, which was a pit where they would lower the prisoners down through this hole into this pit basically under the castle. Here’s where they would have the cannons and and suits of armor. Here are the the rooms of the person who was the owner of the castle in much more modern times because this is still a familyowned castle. And so it is still portions of it a residence. But interesting little castle. Not necessarily really historically significant or important, but just kind of an interesting time capsule of what it would be like to live in a castle in medieval times and then up more towards modern times. And I stayed that night in Mirsburg. Mirsburg is definitely a city that would bear some more investigation. It was one of those cities where or towns, I guess, where I wish that I’d had time to just sit and hang out in the city square during the middle of the day. Stayed in a hotel that was in an 800-year-old building, the hotel Zoom shif, and they had a restaurant right there on the water looking out on Lake Constance. But very picturesque city and at least three interesting museums to see while you’re in Mirsburg. And that day and the next day were probably my longer days of biking and probably about two and a half hours of biking total. So if you want to do things along the lake, then you can’t just bike all day obviously. And that was really the idea part of the trip is there are things to see here. And so it was a nice mix of getting out seeing the countryside, beautiful countryside, as well as having these destinations that were worth a visit. So that was day three. Day four, I got up and biked to the ferry instad. You could bike further along the lake, but they wanted me to try some of the ferry system. And it was interesting to do because one of the things that I realized on the ferry is you could do much of this trip and have as enjoyable time as I had without do the biking and without doing the driving by just taking the fairies around the lake from town to town. Now, it would be a little harder, for instance, to get out to the Salem Monastery and the Basilica Bernau, but a lot of the other things that I’ve talked about are all connected by ferry. Even the island of Mina now is connected by ferry as well. And in Reich, as I mentioned, connected by ferry, although once you’re there, from the ferry up into the museum, for instance, would be a long walk. So, that was useful to have a bike on that day. But a lot of the things I’m seeing here, like the pile dwellings, the three museums that I saw in Mirsburg, the garden island, the museum that I’m going to talk about next are all right near the fairies. And so if you were interested in exploring this region and not even worrying about driving, driving does get very busy on the tiny roads in the area in the summertime. Otherwise, the biggest problem with driving would be just parking in these medieval towns. I’m always looking for ways to show my cat how much I love her. And with Fancy Feast Gems, I can pamper her whenever I want with a savory gravy on top of a gourmet mousse pate. The pyramid shape makes serving simple. So, all I have to do is peel and plate to make meal time feel extra fancy. And with two entre in every pack, it’s easy to turn everyday into the extraordinary. Fancy piece gems. Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn’t change. Your receipt did. The Sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5 only at McDonald’s for a limited time. Prices and participation may vary. So the next stop was the Zeppelin Museum. So when you get to Friedri’s Havvern and you take the ferry in just 80 ft away is the old train station from Lindau. This used to be a unique train station where the train cars would come off the tracks, get lifted up by a crane, and put on a boat and sent over to Constance where they would continue on their journey. But they don’t do that anymore. Things either go around or don’t go by train, go by truck these days. And so they had this big train station they didn’t really need. They moved the regular train station a little further inland and gave this large building to the Zeppelin Museum. And many of you know what a Zeppelin is, but a Zeppelin is like a blimp. So, it is a lighter than air aircraft. The heyday of the Zeppelin was probably World War I into the early days just before World War II. probably the the highlight of the zeppelin would be the second journey of the Hindenburg right up until it caught fire and exploded. But they were made by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin who was a retired German army officer saw tethered balloons during the American Civil War. They used them for observation. They would raise them up and then lower them down on cables. and he had this idea for a rigid airship. So an airship that has a rigid frame to it so that when it is not filled with helium or hydrogen then it would still have its same shape unlike a blimp which is a big inflated balloon and if you take the helium of the hydrogen out it deflates. And so he had this idea for this and some of the places that he tried the experiments for creating these airships were in Friedrich Hoffen and that is why the Zeppelin Museum is here in Friedri’s Hoffen. So in 1900, the first Zeppelin makes its maiden flight and it makes it over Lake Constants and they got bigger and bigger over the years with the largest one ever being made being the Hindenburg which unfortunately was destroyed when a fire started in it because the US would not sell the Germans that here’s Nazi Germany at the time helium and we controlled a lot of the helium production so they had to fill it with hydrogen which was not the original plan. Helium is an inert gas. Hydrogen is highly flammable. And so that led to the destruction of the Hindenburg. But this museum, if you stand outside it, it’s a large museum. The Hindenburg was three times larger than this museum is. Larger than the largest airplane you’ve been on by at least twice as long, probably two and a half times as long. And in this museum, you can see models that compare the sizes of the different zeppelins. You can see the history of the Zeppelin and other lighter than aircraft crafts including some of the histories of blimps. And in this region, as you have been traveling around, when you look up several times during the day, you will see a modern zeppelin flying by. And there is still zeppelin rides that go out of Friedri’s Havoc with the museum, but that would be pretty cool to do. I did not get a chance to do that. My understanding is a flight is about $400 for half an hour. So, not a cheap thing to do, but it would be pretty cool. If you’re a fan of the history of the Zeppelin and the history of aircraft, it’d be interesting to see, you know, how they were used in World War I. And there were some of the first bombing of London was done with zeppelins. They actually were used at some time like aircraft carriers with they would carry some of these light World War I aircraft on them. And there were quite a few made during World War I. But then in that interwar period, they were trying to make them into leisure crafts, expensive luxury crafts that were going all over the world. So you could cross the Atlantic, for instance, in something like 3 days versus the 5 days it would take on a steam ship. They had a large crew and a small number of passengers. So something like 50 crew and 50 passengers. So, it was an expensive proposition to fly in a Zeppelin. The cabins were not very fancy. It’s interesting. There’s a relatively small passengers space and they’ve taken a part of this museum and recreated some of the passenger cabins, some of the lounges. Get to peek behind what the kitchens looked like, what the smoking lounge looked like, because this is the 1930s. You’ve got to have a smoking lounge. You can’t imagine that people would not smoke for 3 days. But of course, you’re in a craft that is filled with flammable gas. And so they would put leather on the walls that would prevent flames from spreading. Hopefully, you would have to check in your smoking equipment and the steward would hand it to you as you went in the smoking lounge. So fascinating museum. Thoroughly enjoyed it. There are English speaking tours available. Also, much of the information in the museum is in German and English and a few other languages as well. But I thoroughly enjoyed the Zeppelin Museum there in Friedick’s Hoffen. Oh, one of the strangest things I learned at the Zeppelin Museum is that the original gas bladders were made of cow intestines, which seems like a strange thing. Seven different layers of cow intestines. Quite a few cows gave their lives for those large gas bladders. I can’t imagine it. The other interesting thing previously I had done a press trip in Germany prior to the 500th anniversary of the reformation and as part of that trip not associated with the reformation I had gone to where the bow house movement had gotten to start which was a modern architecture movement that also changed the design of interior furniture as well. And the Hindenburg had these aluminum framed chairs that would be coming from the bow house movement. So to us they look fairly modern but of course it would been very very modern at the time but was very lightweight and with a lighter than aircraft weight is very important. After lunch right there in the museum restaurant at the Zeppelin Museum, I got back on the bike and I biked to Linda through the countryside there along the lake. And the first thing I went to was an art forum, a gallery that was dedicated to the artist Hundaser. Some of you know modern art and architecture better than I do, and so Hundred Vaser means more to you than it probably did to me at the time. But this is a German artist and architect. His architecture probably similar to the style of Gaudi. And his artwork, I don’t know that it’s similar to anybody’s style except it is very bright. It is very almost childlike in its bright colors and geometric shapes. Basically, in the old post office, there is this gallery that is dedicated to him. So, if you’re a fan of modern art and you happen to find yourself in Lindow, I would recommend that you would probably enjoy this exhibition. But the other exhibition that I thoroughly enjoyed and you definitely should do if you’re in Lindow is there is a marionette opera company there. And I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a marionette opera. I got to see a little samples of it. But you are listening to a classical presentation of an opera or an opera in this historic theater, but all of the actors on stage are about 2 and 1/2t tall marionettes. And for each character in the opera or opera, if there is a costume change, there is a different marionette. When you go to one of these performances, if you go to an actual performance, I just get did a little tour, you will also get a peek backstage afterwards to see the collection of marionets and how the puppeteers are handling these marionets to make them walk and dance and all the things that they do. It’s just was fascinating to watch. Just the artistry behind it was very interesting. And on a longer tour, which you wouldn’t get when you would go to a presentation, I got to go upstairs into the loft and see all the puppets from all the presentations they have ever done. And each different opera or opera has not only its own set of puppets, but each one has a different style. And so the puppets from FA might look much more severe where something from a comedy might look much more comical or bright or just a different style of artwork in the puppets themselves. Fascinating to see this art form which is more than 100 years old and has been preserved. It really started prefilm and it allows you to do things on stage with a puppet that you might not be able to do with an actor, especially in that time frame. So, I would recommend that if in the area, I also went out to the lighthouse in the area. I did not climb the lighthouse, but just enjoyed the views of the harbor there, the old medieval harbor. By this point, I had done a lot of biking that day and had a lot of biking left to do. And so, I just didn’t need a few more steps added on to that. Instead, I needed 15 minutes to sit, have a cool drink, and an ice cream cone. Before I continued on that day, because I had more biking to do, I biked on into Austria. And so the next step of my journey was going to Brigettz, Austria, which is the eastern end of the lake. Day five, I started in Brigettz and that morning I took the cable car up Fender Mountain. Took one of the first cable cars up. I think they started about 8:00. I think I was in the 8:30 cable car up to the top of the mountain where you get views of the lake that are spectacular. And then also in the other direction, views of the Alps because the Swiss and the Austrian Alps are at the end of the lake, the southern shore. And so as I’m biking along on the clearer days, I’m seeing the lake with all the pictures towns and in the background the Alps, but you could really see those well by going up the mountain here in Burggants. So that was quite enjoyable to go up the mountain. Again, if you had more time, you should do what I didn’t have time to do, which is spend a couple hours up there doing some of the hikes. And so that would have been an enjoyable thing to do. And then I biked from there to Switzerland. I biked to Rorshach, Switzerland, and had lunch at the Varte Castle and then into Rorshack. uh got a train and went to St. Gallon and St. Gallen is the third of the UNESCO World Heritage sites I went to. This is the abbey district of St. Gallen. And the abbey of St. Gallen goes back to Gallas who was an Irish monk who settles in the valley around Lake Constance in 612 AD. He lives as a hermit and then after his death a group of monks grew around his grave and so in 1719 you get officially a Benedictine monastery is founded in this site gets to be a quite a large monastery and one of the things that they managed to do is it’s renowned for its library. There are three things that you should see on the guided tour. And the first one is the library. And if you’ve been to some of the most spectacular libraries in Europe, I think of the library in Quimbra, Portugal, which we’ve talked about on the show, or the one maybe at Trinity College in Dublin. The Abbey Library of St. Gallen holds 170,000 works with manuscripts over a thousand years old. and it is an incredibly gorgeous library that competes visually with those other libraries and it’s worth seeing. And then the second site that you should see in is just downstairs from there and the seller of the same building. They have a historical presentation of the history of St. Gallen and the monasteries in the area and what their connection is with other things that are going on at the time. And then the third exhibit in St. gallon is across the way in the monastery and it is the archives and one of the reasons why this is UNESCO heritage site is that through the hundreds of years that this monastery has been around it has been able to preserve its archives through wars and dissolutions of churches and all of those sorts of things that have happened in this area and it is one of the most outstanding archives and so there’s a presentation there about the archives. And then specifically, one of the most interesting things was there’s a special video presentation where you go into a darkened room and they show you a plexiglass model of the monastery and then talk about a particular plans that were found in the monastery which were the plans for the monastery as they were originally created on the island of Reichanau. So it all goes back to Reichanau. Two monks in Reich Canau made the plans, drew them on a large piece of vellum, sewed together from multiple different calves, and drew the plans for a monastery in not a strict scale model fashion, but in the these are the sorts of things you need to have for a monastery. So, if you’re a medieval monastery, you’re going to be doing a lot of scriptures. You’re going to be copying a lot of the Bible and things like that. So you have to have calves for cal skin for vellum. You have to have sheep. You have to have geese so that you can have quills. You have to have a place where the older monks are going to live and a hospital, a place where you’re going to bury monks because they’re going to live there for the rest of their lives. You have to have a bakery. And all of these things are drawn on this document from the 800s. And they have a very good presentation. They walk you through the map of a monastery through the life of a fictitious monk. So they start with him being dedicated brought by his parents at the age of six and then he’s going to grow up doing these sort of things as a child and then he’s going to become a nviciate and then he’s going to join the monastery when he becomes an adult and then he’s going to go to the scriptorum where he’s going to be writing various copies of documents. How many documents would he write over the course of his life? And then he’s going to basically get too old to be able to see and he’s going to move over to this section where the old monks live and this chapel for the the hospital and and here’s where he’s going to be buried. And it was a very good presentation that sort of gave you a glimpse into what monastic life was like. And then at the end they raise up this plexiglass model of the monastery and show you the actual document that they’ve been talking about. and you get to see that for a few seconds before they close that up, turn the lights back on and and let you back out again. So, that was a very interesting presentation. The other thing that I did not get a chance to see because I was just tired from biking by the time I got to St. Gallen was they’re also well known for their textile museum and their chocolate shop and some ponds and things like that. But by the time I got there, I didn’t have a chance to see all that. Again, it would be worth spending more time in St. gallon little larger city, beautiful historic core with the monastery there and more to see around it as well. So, I could have used probably a whole another day in St. Gallen. It would be worth spending some time there. And with that, that was pretty much it. The next day, I returned the bike, got back on a train to Zurich. The train goes right to the airport, got on a flight, flew home. Some things to talk about with the biking. I brought along a mount so I could mount my iPhone to the handlebars on my bike. That was a really good idea because for navigation, I had some maps that had been given to me that were highle maps from the tourism board, but I really was getting around with Google maps with the bike navigation, which sometimes led me astray. it sometimes didn’t know that I should be on this side of the creek on the pave path instead of that side of the creek on what was not really a path but a dirt road. So, it occasionally led me off by a little bit but it was generally pretty good but it was useful to have it be able to see it as I was biking there. Also, the bikes the bikes that I got from from this organization that’s moving your luggage also have something in the front that you can keep a water bottle or some small amounts of things there. Come with a lock so you can lock up the bike and then also have a paneer in the back only on one side but it was big enough to fit my backpack so that I could bring a jacket along. I ran into really great weather, but the week after I was there, there was more rain and so you might want to have some rain protection with you or you might want to have I had my sunglasses as well as my regular glasses. And then I was also biking with my Ray-B band metag glasses so I could take video while I was biking as well. But the bike worked out very well. Again, not sorry that I got the uh the beast, the heavy ebike, but something to think about if you do want to do the bike trip. And again, the boat trip would be a wonderful option as well. Most of the things I talked about accessible directly from the boat. St. Gallen would be a train ride in, but again, good train coverage in this area, too. I really was pessimistic that I was going to get off a plane in Zurich and through customs and on a train up to Constance in an hour and yet I did and I had time to spare to do that because the train station is right there in the airport and customs is very smooth and it just was a model of Swiss efficiency in terms of being able to do that. One thing I should say is I had a Bowden plus card. I I say Bowden. The name of the lake is Lake Constance or in German the Bowden, the Bowden Sea. And there’s a Bowden card which will get you to 160 different experiences. You can buy it for as little as €78. I think that’s for 3 days, but there also different versions of it for 7 days and things like that. I’ll put a link in the show notes where you can get that, but it gets you to 160 different things including the cable car, the Salem Monastery, some bus lines, the castle tour that I did, the Zeppelin Museum. So, lots of different things, including other castles that would be easier to get to if you did have a car. If you’re going to do this as a car trip, there are things that are in a wider range around the lake that you can see if you go to this card, including other museums and other castles and palaces and those sorts of things. But the Boden card was made things very handy for me and it’s something that you can get as well. One other little comment about the bike and that is it came with not a whole lot of instructions. So, if you haven’t ridden an ebike before, that could be an issue. I had ridden one before, so I knew how to use it. But there was still one thing that I didn’t know, which was there was a key that came in the information, and I didn’t see any explanation of what that key did, but a couple other bikers were able to tell me that that’s the key that unlocked the battery, so I could remove it and bring it up, for instance, to my room and charge it. And charging cables were included as well. That’s kind of the basics of my trip. Wonderful trip. Really enjoyed it. I think you would enjoy it either as a biking trip or not as a biking trip. As I get to some of the wrap up questions, standing in the prettiest spot, where am I standing? What am I looking at? Probably that would be going up the gondola in the Austria portion of the trip and being able to see one direction the Alps and the other direction the sea, including some of the medieval towns and such along the side of the lake. That was just a really pretty spot. But my now and the garden island were also very pretty. So probably a toss up between those two. One thing that makes me laugh and say only in Lake Constance. I would have to say that when I was biking on one of the days when I was in the north side of the lake, it’s the only time that I’ve been biking that I got stuck behind a boat. So I didn’t say that. Sometimes you’re on a bike path, but often these are small roads that are also used by cars. Although on a lot of them they’re predominantly bikes. You see more bikes than cars on a lot of these paths, but some of them occasionally there will be a car driving on that and you’re like, “Oh, I kind of thought it was a bike path, but I guess it’s both.” But on this one, there was a sailboat that was being moved. So, there was a great big truck that was moving a sailboat along this rather narrow lane away from the harbor. And there were a pack of bicyclists including myself who were stuck behind a boat. And that’s a first for me. And if I had to summarize Lake Constants or the Bowden in just three words, what three words would I use? Beautiful, historic, and delicious. I really didn’t talk that much about the food that I was eating. I was eating a lot of German traditional foods like vice vers. by choice. Usually in most of these places that was what I was ordering. But I find that the food in Germany since I was first there, my first trip to Germany was in 87 has really improved. It is both diversified, so there’s more international food available, but also there’s just more salads available and it is a better food experience than it was back then in my opinion. and had some wonderful meals, including some very traditional meals. Had some killer desserts, including an apple dessert at the Langast House Paradis in Frickan, which is a real apple area. I saw all sorts of tractors, tailing, trailers loaded with apples. And I’ll include a PDF in the show notes, which is my itinerary giving all the restaurants and all the hotels that I stayed at, as well as the route that I took. and a great big almost French toast like tart in Austria. That was something I really wish I’d had three friends to share, but delicious would be my third word. And that was my trip to Lake Constance. [Music] Wish you could become a morning person. 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And with that, we’re going to end this episode of Amateur Traveler. If you have any questions, send an email to chris2xgmail.com or better yet, leave a comment on this episode atamaturtraveler.com. And thanks so much for listening. I got to see one more cathedral. I got to sit in one more cafe. I know that I should be heading home, but maybe not. Maybe not today.