It rained most of the night, was still raining in the morning, and is still raining now at 6pm. The first real spell of rain on the trip, although we've had plenty of cloudy and partly-cloudy weather. Anyway, today we said goodby to our B&B hosts, Karl and Ursula Bredl, and left Bamberg for Rudolstadt.
Rudolstadt is not a place we particularly want to visit; it just happened to be halfway from Bamberg to Goslar, which is our next base of operations. We drove through the rain and low clouds along small roads that went up and down through heavily-wooded valleys. This is (according to our atlas) winter-sports country. There were no obvious ski resorts or slopes. Maybe cross-country skiing? Anyway, it looked as if it would be very pretty country, if we could have seen it through the fog.
Lauscha
Along the way we stopped in Lauscha to see a museum of glass. Since this is not in either of our guidebooks, there is no way of knowing how David happened to include it in the Purple Plan, but there it was.
Not long after starting north from Bamberg we began to notice how the houses were no longer stucco-coated but rather, covered in fine slate. By Lauscha, almost all the houses were slate-walled.
Here's a particularly elegant example. Note the bulgy windows, no doubt hand-blown in this town where every other shop is selling handmade glass objects.
The museum had interesting displays of glass technique, some history of the industry in Lauscha, and some art pieces (but, alas, no English labels). Here is a very elegant teapot.
There were nice things in the shops, too. We bought some small objects in this shop.
Marian under umbrella eyes the goods.
The lady whose shop this was, and who made all the things in it, was a real artist, selling really unique things, unlike the fairly kitschy items in other shops in the village. Also she didn't take credit cards and isn't on the internet. "I don't like," she said.
Umleitung/Detour
We headed out on "yellow" roads (secondary ones, in our atlas) for Rudolstadt. After a while we noted the dreaded Umleitung sign. The German roads are so well-maintained, but the price of that is frequent maintenance. When they want to work on a secondary road, they just close it. Well before the closure, they put up the Umleitung (detour) arrow pointing off on some side road which, if you know the area or have a good map, will eventually lead to a road that leads to a road that brings you back to the route you want.
What they do not do, is go put up some more Umleitung signs to guide clueless foreigners through subsequent road junctions. Just the one sign, sorry, try that-a-way, and best of luck.
Actually this time Marian did know where we were in the atlas and we wouldn't have gotten lost even without Julie.
Julie-the-GPS's reaction to Umleitung is interesting. You start down what to her algorithm is the wrong road, and for a few kilometers, she keeps pointing out all the places where you could do a U-turn and get back on what she thinks is the right track.
Then, after a while, the deviant route comes to look shorter than a back-track would be, and suddenly she's pointing us ahead down the umleitung trail. Or something just as good. There's no way of knowing which way the German road department really meant us to go.
Four-Star
Rudolstadt was the one town where we aren't pre-booked in a hotel since last June. We'd find accommodation on the day. Approaching, Marian read about a hotel in the guidebook that sounded good: 4-star, recommended restaurant on the premises. So we put its address in Julie, and darn good thing we did, because we would never ever have found this place without. Julie led us through a suburb and up some alleys and along a wooded track to a hilltop. So we've moved up from an urban B&B to a 4-star (€120/night for a room with a view over Rudolstadt) place. Ah, the luxury. Tomorrow, back to 2-star land.
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