a visit of the castle garden
As the castle brochure boasts of a large private garden, we set out after breakfast to discover it. We follow the map to the entrance and descend through the dry moat to the tiered garden. The hill side is pretty steep and the garden is definitely not wheelchair accessible. There’s pavilions looking out over the Rhein valley and even an open sided structure with a pool table.
a long drive
We follow the Rhein valley until Bingen Am Rhein. We’ve done this same route by bike in 2000, when we cycled from Bonn to Idar-Oberstein. In Bingen we hop on the high way and start our long drive to Grafenau. The weather is mostly dry, traffic mostly okay and the count of road works is limited. We cut the six hour drive into four blocks and switch drivers each time. The car GPS regularly proposed to quit the highway to avoid traffic jams, but we follow this advice only once, to avoid a long jam due to road works.
Past Regensburg we spot a patch of snow and when we drive higher and higher it turns out the whole area around the hotel is covered in snow. The temperature varies between 0 and -9°, so we have good hopes that the snow will still be there in the morning. We arrive around 5 pm, leave our car to chill in the snow and get installed in our room. We’ll stay for 7 nights, so we can unpack all our stuff and get installed.
Febe writes 