Reaching Radolfzell-am-Bodensee

Here we are at Radolfzell, till Tuesday morning. It looks like a place worth seeing. The building on the right in this photo houses a promising bookshop and our hotel is just beyond it, round the corner and up the cobbled slope, the Hotel am Steingarten. The weather is wet and windy now, but I'm sure we'll cope. We arrived on a regional train from Ulm that stopped at Biberach, Bad Schussenried, Aulendorf, Ravensburg (in 1995 I thought for a while we'd be going to live there, but we moved to Ottawa instead; it's a long story), Meckenbeuren, Friedrichshafen (of Zeppelin fame) and then along the lakeshore for the rest of the way, a pleasant ride altogether. We had some glimpses of the lower slopes of the Alps, snow covered, but too gloomy to photograph because of the dark clouds that were descending and approaching from the west. 

That was the train we rode in from Ulm, train No. 10 on this trip. Here are the notes from my notebook, for what they're worth:

Caught the 14:04 from Platform 7 at Ulm bound for Basel. Storks or white egrets in the fields? Goat, hens, horses, hikers. Chris nodded off. Riverside cart roads, rushing streams, locks, log piles, beehives, vineyards. 

After checking into our room we refortified ourselves at the Goodways Coffee shop, serving tea and cakes of excellent quality, then walked down to the lake which was choppy from the wind, little waves breaking on the beach.

Mysterious branches at nightfall by the lake
at Radolfzell

Off-season view of Radolfzell, with my back to the lake

This evening we had supper at an Indian restaurant in the Höllturm-Passage below our hotel, tasty but very slow in being served. We waited for more than an hour between our appetisers and our main course at which I lost my temper and complained. The two waiters apologised profusely and gave us complimentary shot glasses of "Mango-Schnapps" at the end of our meal. We needed fresh air after that, so repeated our pre-supper walk round the old town; the rain has stopped now and the moon and stars have come out.

We found out who Radolf (or Radolt) was, by the way. He was a Bishop of Verona who had a "cella" (chapel) built here during the 9th century.