Saturday, July 6th, 2024

Distance ridden 353 kilometres

You will not be surprised to learn that I slept like a log, indeed it was after 06:30 when I stirred and the sun was already shining outside of our window. I made Lucie a coffee, thanks to the in-room facilities and she more or less immediately began packing. We had ascertained that Mr Hundertwasser’s creation, the “Ronald McDonald haus”, was able to be approached through the same Gruga Park, the fence of which we had disconsolately stared over the previous evening. Access was via the main gate and the park opened at 09:00. As breakfast in our hotel did not begin until 08:00, we needed to be on our toes to leave as soon as we had eaten it.

For information, the Ronald McDonald haus (Unterm Sternenzeit 1, Essen) is supported by the Golden Arches Corporation (McDonald’s), with the worthy aim of providing support and accommodation to the families of sick children being treated in nearby Essen hospital.

Considering the extremely reasonable cost of our night’s stay, the breakfast was good. It was, pretty much, the same as in most places, but the bread was very fresh, the cheese was excellent and the eggs were perfectly hard-boiled. Lucie did the thing with honey and jogurt and certainly did not leave any.

We ate up, checked out, packed the Harley and were on the road by 08:45.

The roads of Essen were very quiet. The party atmosphere of the previous evening had evaporated along with Germany’s place in the EURO 2024 tournament. A few German flags still fluttered (to add “limply” would be inaccurate as it was quite windy, but I am sure you get the picture) but the streets were largely deserted. Our progress through the city was smooth and easy, I only had to stop once in the eight kilometre ride and we found the main entrance to the Gruga Park (Messe Platz 1, Essen) quite easily. We parked and walked to the cash desk where a charming lady said that, if we only wanted to view the Hundertwasser Haus and then go, we did not need to pay !!! That is a better result than Germany got !!!

We took a quick stroll through what is a lovely and well laid out park. We like parks and it was somewhere we would definitely have spent more time had we had any to spend.

We easily located the Haus.

It is as odd and charismatic as all of Hundertwasser’s stuff with the usual array of “signature” touches that make it unmistakably his work.

We took our pictures, ticked our mental box and we were out of there.

Sadly, we needed to pass by a market of cacti and succulents without stopping as there would have been no room in the panniers for anything spiky !

We quickly thanked the kind lady on the till and saddled up to head for our next Hundertwasser location, which was in a town near Frankfurt and over 200 kilometres away.

The exit from the park led directly onto an urban expressway and we needed petrol. I bet you can already guess where this is going. There were no immediate exits and no petrol stations shown on the SatNav for for the next sixty kilometres. The range indicator suggested we would be fine, but it fluctuated and memories of a totally empty tank in New Zealand began to reassert themselves. Sensing my anxiety, my ever resourceful wife went to the Czech map program on her iPhone and managed to locate a garage, that the SatNav was unaware of, on a small side road. She saved the day yet again !

The route was almost entirely motorway as we headed first across the Wuppertal region on the A52 and then towards Leverkusen, Bonn and Köln (Cologne) before turning south towards Frankfurt-am-Main on the A3. As ever, there was not much of any real interest to see, although there has been a steady increase in the amount of nearby railway infrastructure in the many years that I have been driving that road. Some of the flyovers and cuttings that smooth out the progress of the railway line in that undulating area, are impressive indeed.

There was a lot of traffic. Whether this was the start of the holiday season or just “Germany are out of the EUROS, so let us go for a drive in our car”, I cannot say. Because of the sheer volume of cars, there was a lot of congestion and, frequently, kilometre after kilometre of slow-moving traffic. Notice that I said “slow-moving”. Germans can drive very fast, but they also understand how to drive slowly. They do it sensibly and in an orderly way. In sixty kilometres of crawling traffic, I only put my foot down twice. The second of those times was when we could actually see our turn-off and when a Police car brought the whole motorway to a complete halt, just so that some Dutch driver could retrieve his fallen-off number plate from the carriageway …..

We moved on – and turned off of the A3 onto the amusing (to me at least) A66 towards Bad Soden am Taunus where, after a tricky navigation through some tiny side streets, we located our second Hundertwasserhaus of the day.

This was a kind of office building/block of flats beside the sweet little park that gives it its address (Zum Quellenpark, Bad Soden am Taunus). As ever, it was an eye-catching place and we wondered what it would be like to live or work there.

Just along the road was another (normal) house, marked as a former residence of the composer, Richard Wagner, but what did he ever do ?

No sooner had we sat in the park to view the haus than it began to rain. It was not a drenching deluge, but we certainly did not really want to ride around in it. Out came the almost inevitable weather radar App which implied the rain would stop in twenty minutes. In the end, it was a disappointing twenty-two minutes, but that was it for the day with regard to precipitation.

We saddled up, in an un-yellowed status and headed back the way we had come in from and then into an endless maze of urban expressways that eventually discharged us onto the streets of Darmstadt about forty kilometres to the south. A big fan of public transport, particularly the electrified kind, Lucie was pleased to note that long (and I mean long) stretches of this motorway bore the overhead wires for trolley buses.

In Darmstadt we found what some consider to be the jewel in Hundertwasser’s crown, the Waldspirale (Forest Spiral) (Friedberger Strasse/Vilbeler Strasser, Darmstadt – you will not miss it !).

This is an entire city block, constructed in the maestro’s unmissable style. The domes, the trees, the multi-coloured columns are all there and it towers above the neighbourhood. There must be hundreds of flats. It REALLY is something to see !

We rode away almost reluctantly. It was “mission accomplished” for this trip, at least as far as our search for Hundertwasser buildings went. Lucie had now decided we needed a rest – and by “rest” she of course meant anything but.

We set course towards somewhere I had never heard of (principally because I usually just agree with Lucie’s plans without listening to the aural fine print), the town of Leidersbach. This lays in the rolling hills, south of Aschaffenburg.

We had a place booked in the Landhotel-Gasthof “Zur Krone” (Hauptstrasse 106, Leidersbach).

In this case, by “place” I mean the “Ferienwohnung” which was a THREE bedroomed flat, way bigger than our apartment in Prague, which Lucie had booked primarily because it had a terrace for her to smoke on …… Seriously, we had to choose a bedroom and could have moved there and not filled all the cupboards !

We were pretty exhausted by the time we arrived, so it was fortunate that there was also a fine restaurant downstairs. We enjoyed a very filling meal of mushrooms and dumplings for Lucie (much more delicious than it sounds) and beef with mushrooms (they were in season !) and croquettes for me. There was some excellent dark beer too, but you do not get to see any of it as my iPhone was charging somewhere in the depths of our flat.

After the meal I was able to watch England fail to demolish Switzerland, but then beat them in a penalty shoot-out. England, at least, was still in the EUROS and Gareth Southgate still had a job.

It had been a long day, so there are no prizes for guessing what I did as soon as my pulse-rate dropped below 150 !