We initially were headed for a spa town called Bad Kissingen but when we arrived at the campsite reception, we were greeted by a sign on the firmly-closed door saying that it was shut between 12 and 2. As there was still a lady inside at the reception desk, I hoped that she might take pity on us, but when she came to the door, she merely opened it, told me that we couldn’t check in until 2, locked up and disappeared, presumably home for lunch. This bit of German precision annoyed me so much that I declared we would not stay there. We proceeded to another site which was situated at a sports centre, but somehow we both agreed it didn’t look very nice, so we decided to take a risk and head for a so-called “Stellplatz”, something we had not done before. These are effectively car parks for camper vans. They do provide plug-in posts for electricity and a waste disposal slot but nothing else in the way of facilities such as showers, hence they are nice and cheap. This one was located adjacent to a swimming pool complex and was populated by people who seemed considerably more friendly and communicative than those we had come across on the regular campsites. We got into pleasant conversations with several families, including a young Danish couple who were spending their paternity / maternity leave driving around Europe with their tiny infant.
Something we love to do in Germany is go for a Greek meal. Every German town will have at least one Greek restaurant and Coburg seemed to have three. The lady at the swimming pool told us how to get to the nearest one. This was when we made a slight mistake, by telling our neighbours (an elderly couple – the man was 82 and was still driving his huge campervan for five hours a day) about our plan to go to the Greek restaurant. We wandered through some pleasant suburbs to find the restaurant, which had a delightful garden in the shade of some willow trees. There was just one table available, so we sat down. Immediately the very eccentric, middle-aged, wild haired waiter came over and said that we should have approached him and asked to be seated. We apologised but he told us that the table was reserved. Birgit did her normal excellent job of being charming and I put on my naïve, ignorant foreigner act and he agreed to move us to an unlaid table on the outer fringe, on condition that we ate up quickly. We ordered and were waiting for our food to arrive when we noticed the old couple from the Stellplatz at the entrance. The waiter was shaking his head emphatically and clearly saying there was no availability. To my horror, I noticed that the lady was pointing towards our table and us, and in no time she had convinced the waiter that we were friends and were waiting for them to arrive. Thus it was that we had to share our planned romantic tête à tête with whatever the German equivalent of a Daily Mail reader is. Luckily, their food took ages to come and we were able to escape.
The centre of Coburg was absolutely stunning, like something out of a Grimm’s fairy tale, with frescoed buildings, a beautiful town square and atmospheric narrow, cobbled streets. We ended up in the sweetest little bar imaginable for a late-night schnapps. The following day we planned to visit the castle at the top of the hill overlooking the town, but before that we spent a couple of hours in the swimming pool complex, where there was a huge variety of pools of different temperatures, some indoor and some outdoor. To get to the castle there was a minor problem in that roadworks meant that the bus up the hill wasn’t running and we had been warned that the pedestrian route was extremely steep. A visit to the local travel centre brought the result that we were given a replacement taxi to take us up to the top. I had visited that castle as an impressionable teenager on a school trip in the 1960s and was thrilled to discover that absolutely nothing had changed, as we wandered round the battlements to the accompaniment of the buzzing of a gigantic swarm of bees. I became engrossed in a reverie about ageing and all that life had brought me in the years since the last visit. We strolled back down to the hill and sought out an atmospheric Gasthaus, where our beers were brought to the table by a robot. I even enjoyed some shopping (something which is normally an anathema to me) because there were so many fun independent shops actually selling interesting things. Most days on our six-week trip were pretty much like this but the visit to Coburg was a representative example of the wonderful times we had.
