7 Oct: Schleswig Schwerin

This ended up a pretty thin day, and that was mostly David's fault.

Tuesday we stopped at the Deutches Bahn (DB) travel center in the Hauptbahnhof and bought discounted 2nd-class tickets for four rail day-trips. The DB lady printed out timetable sheets for each trip and gave us four envelopes, each containing a ticket and a timetable. The trip for yesterday was to Bremerhaven. The one for today, Thursday, was to Schleswig, and for Friday, Schwerin.

Early this morning David cut out the Schleswig pages of the Rough Guide and Day Trips books and got out the DB envelope with the Schleswig stuff. And looked at the timetable sheet to see when the train left and from what track.

Now, it appears that the DB lady had stuffed a Schwerin timetable into the Schleswig envelope. And it showed a 9:15 departure with a 2-hour duration and a train change. So David thinks, hah, I bet there's a better choice of trains. So he goes to the DB website and checks the timetable for Schwerin—not noticing that his mind has just been switched onto the wrong track, so to speak. There is indeed a direct train for Schwerin leaving at 8:36, and right after breakfast we hustle across the street to the HbF and catch it.

Half an hour along, the conductor lady comes along and we get out the ticket and discover it is a Schleswig ticket and realize, oh yeah, we are on a Schwerin train. Great chagrin ensues. Conductrix is nice and just writes a note on the back of the ticket (the two prices are almost the same).

So now we arrive in Schwerin without our usual guidebook info and no map. Just a vague recollection that the main attraction was a big schloss on the edge of a lake.

Well, long, embarrassing story short, we found a tourist info office, got a map, and eventually found the schloss.

Does this say "fairy tale castle" to you?

The Rough Guide really oversold this one, calling it "gloriously over the top" and having a "fairy-tale" look. Anyway, we went in, had lunch in the schloss restaurant, took the tour with electronic audio guides (which worked well and had good info) and saw a bunch of elegant rooms with antique furniture.

It would have been possible to take a boat ride on the lake behind and seen it from the water, but there was a solid gray overcast and a breeze, so no good light and no reflections, ergo no photographic point in that, and it was chilly. So we headed back to the train station.

We stopped for coffee on the way, which was unfortunate in that we then missed a good train and had to wait an hour on the platform for the next. So it came to about 5 hours of Deutches Bahn time for 2 hours of Schloss time.

A thin day, plus the prospect of trying to get DB to exchange tomorrow's Schwerin ticket for a Schleswig one. Anyway we'll go try to find a good supper now.

Immense London Plane tree in a Schloss garden.