Full Day of Driving along the Bodensee

This morning, we got up to take our full long day journey to Freiburg, completely on the other end of Germany. We had originally wanted to go through Switzerland, but in typical Swiss fashion, they required an expensive sticker for our car—and apparently it was only available in an annual pass at nearly $100. Considering that the cost of our lunch would be about that too, we opted to forego Zurich for lunch, and plan a route that took us on the north side of Lake Constanz, going through various towns and then up to Freiburg. Our first stop—Lindau Island.

Coming into Lindau Island, you cross over a bridge to a small island town that is situated on Lake Constanz. We stopped initially on the street to try street parking, yet it was only available for 30 minutes, so we then went ahead to the car park over on the side near the train station. We parked the car and headed back into town starving for a good lunch.

We stopped at the Swiss Hotel—a seemingly fitting compromise for our exchange of not being in Switzerland for lunch that afternoon. I had the best chicken finger salad, which was very large. I was very happy with my meal after having had so many heavy meals before—it was good to have some salad finally!

We enjoyed sitting facing the lighthouse and the water and people watched as we devoured our lunch. We then walked around the city and followed various patheways that ended up showing us really how small the island was. You could walk from one end to the other in probably 30 minutes, so luckily, we felt like we’d seen everything by the time we felt we should leave in order to see the Zepplin Museum and learn about the Hindenberg Flight.

We got back to our car and headed on to our next stop, the Zepplin Museum in Friedrichshafen. We arrived just in time to get parked and get our discounted tickets to view the museum at half price since we were coming so late. We were told about an hour to an hour and half should be sufficient for our visit, but I felt pretty rushed. I did want to see more about the actual accident, which wasn’t the centerpiece—it was more supplemental in nature where the museum, rightfully so, focused more on the German engineering that played a huge role in the world’s Aviation history.

After our rushed visit, we were on to our next stop, Meersburg. Coming into Meersburg, we ran into traffic along the BCH as I’ll call it—the Bodensee Coast Highway (like our PCH). We followed this along the whole route since Lindau, and being able to see the beautiful lake on one side and the vineyards on the right side was so peaceful. When we parked, we walked over to the boardwalk to stroll along the waterside and see potential restaurants for dinner. Unfortunately, the one that Robert had found that we were looking forward to ended up being closed, so we had to find another option. We weren’t really that hungry at the time, so we decided to explore on foot first before committing to our dining for the evening.

This lead us down the boardwalk, back up the one street in, up to the castle and other areas that had wonderful look outs over the lake. We weaved our way back down and happened upon a really quaint restaurant that looked good.

We got a soup, and then shared an order of what I believe to be Venison (not my favorite), with Swabian noodles . It was pretty good, and I’m glad we didn’t get more than one dish as it was plenty of food.

After dinner, we continued on our drive which was crowded again. It seemed as it was getting darker that we were really missing some beautiful scenery as we could tell the mountains were big surrounding us, and we could see the trees of the Black Forest getting thicker and thicker. I’d be curious to see what we drove through that night!

We arrived safely in Freiburg and the AirBnb was absolutely perfect. We got the car parked in the garage which was scary as I had to park it in a tiny spot that is angled upward as it’s on a lift in case someone wants to park below, they can lift my car up and park below. We were on the absolute top floor with no elevator, but it was an adorable apartment that was with the angled roof and the awesome german windows that allow you to open them wide open and let fresh air in. We had all the skylights open and enjoyed a cool breeze complete with the babbling creek just at the end of the street. It was a success on airbnb for sure.