The-PITTSTOP: September 2014

August 22: Kalkriese, Germany

Re-creation of battle line protective fence

Continuing further north and following our Roman history interests, we visited the battleground where early Germanic tribes soundly defeated a Roman Legion, in what is known as the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.

We found that the battles here were much like South Carolina's swamp fox in the Revolutionary war. The tribes knew the swamps and forest and were able to set up an ambush. No huge armies facing each other. The tribes were on the high ground and in the swamps and the Romans were caught between them. They picked them off from behind their natural geographically superior positions.

This is also a combination of outdoor living history museum, allowing us to walk the field of battle along with a small indoor museum.

Relief of high grounds and swampy areas where the Roman Soldiers were attacked and routed.

The indoor museum happened to also be having an Egyptian mummy exhibit that was incredible! Unfortunately, no photos allowed.

August: Xanten, Germany

After exploring Dachau, we headed north to find the battery shop that our automotive technicians had recommended to see if we could get another battery. We drove the several hours north, mostly on the Autobahns to evade the heavy traffic around the large cities of Eastern Germany and found the battery shop in an industrial area. It was actually a wholesale operation only, but one of their technicians came out and worked with us for quite a while. Eventually it was decided that replacing only one battery would not work because the two batteries would not be an exact match and one would drag down the other. Rather than spend $500 for two new batteries, knowing we could get them at home for half that price, we figured we could make it a few more weeks on just the one battery.

We had done everything we could to get the RV back to its normal energy levels within financial reasonableness, but it just wasn't going to happen since we were going to ship it home this year. So, we regrouped and decided to just mosey on north, stopping at whatever interested us along the way. We made arrangements to ship the RV home in early September from Amsterdam so we could catch our unchangeable flights home on September 8th.

Okay, the blog is back to touring and no more complaining about RV woes.

This was a camper next to us in one park, so we decided to appreciate what comforts we do have...This guy was traveling for extended periods inside this.....modified trike? The whole top lifts up. He eats sandwiches from a plastic bag, pulls up a pup-tent sized shelter, roams around the campground til dark, then crawls into his tent with all of his many electronic gadgets plugged in to the campground electric and we do not see him again til morning. He crawls out of his shelter, takes a shower at the campground facility, eats more sandwiches for breakfast, packs everything back into his electric trike and off he went!

Castle tower in town

And the roads never seem to get wider and we keep finding ourselves in the oldest, narrowest parts of villages we pass through.

We drove north through some neat villages to the small town of Xanten, Germany, a former Roman outpost. Lots of archaeology had identified the placement of buildings and they have made one of the world's largest outdoor museums, with replicas of the buildings in exactly the same places they would have been.

True to history, the walls and ceilings were painted in bright colors. This was a "sitting" room in a hotel.

They built this on the original footprint of the temple to give us an idea of massive scale.

The arena..

Fascinating contraption full of pulleys that makes lifting/moving huge stones and bricks for building. A child using the contraption can move a multi-ton rock.

This was one of the original pieces they excavated to show the fresh water aqueducts.

Public well replica

The medieval city center is in the background

Jack enjoying being Caesar of the moment

This is a dining room - yes, they ate lying down just like in the cheesy old movie scenes of Roman debauchery.

In addition to the outdoor museum, they also had a traditional museum explaining that this was first a military fort that evolved over time to a city of over 10,000 people.

We walked in to the medieval city center the next morning on the cobbled streets.

August: Germany

Driving at least a couple of hours a day will recharge our "house" batteries, keeping the refrigerator going (as long as there is some propane) and the water pump pumping so we have running water. Waking up on our last morning in Italy, we have dead batteries - completely dead. Nothing works now, including the regrigerator. Big Problem #3. So, if the old adage that bad things come in three's, we should be pretty much done.

Now what? We keep on going to Germany so that we can get propane and see if the generator will recharge the batteries. We headed straight up through the central Alps and through Innsbruck Austria and a few miles into Germany, we stop and easily get our propane tank filled. We run the generator while we are driving the next couple of hours through southern German small villages to charge the batteries. Unfortunately, we were so bummed about our trip's future prospects, we took very few photos going through the Austrian Alps, but it was beautiful. Slowly the snow-capped mountains evolve to lush green small mountains and then hillsides with villages, trees and lush, green grazing land.

Every southern Germany village had these "totem" or Maypoles?

We stopped for the night in southern central Germany and I found a camper store that would look at our battery situation. That night, however, Jack started to explore and found two loose wires under the passenger seat and one of them is live! We figured it belongs to the solenoid that is under the seat and is responsible for isolating the truck engine battery power to our house batteries for recharging. The next morning we stopped at the camping repair place, but they said they did not work on electrical problems and sent us to a Bosch auto repair store.
They are a chain outfit and are something like a combination Autozone parts place and a repair shop for both cars and trucks with huge bays. They took us in an hour later and the technicians were fantastic! They chased down the fault and the good news is they reattached the wire and everything was charging the way it should. The bad news was that one battery was toast and there were no deep-cycle batteries anywhere in the area that we could purchase as a replacement. We now have only one working battery that will barely sustain the refrigerator and water pump as long as we recharge every day by driving at least a couple of hours and/or running the generator.

Close up of some of the symbols on the pole

Translation: Work Will Set You Free
Reality: We Will Work You To Death

We are close to Dachau and we wanted to "visit" the infamous concentration camp. We spent a lot of time going through the excellent museum where we learned that Dachau was primarily a work camp and not a death camp such as Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen. Nevertheless, it was a chilling and sad experience.

The Museum is the white building behind this horrifying sculpture

A monument on the grounds.

August: Italy

Outbuildings began to be of stone

As we headed south into the Italian Alps, we noticed changes immediately. No wood - almost all stone or stucco and bright colored houses began appearing. The roads were different, too - very poor condition and things just appeared rather shabby overall.

Colorful stucco homes

Hilltop town in Lombardy Region

Limestone caves near Anzio, Italy

It took a couple of days to drive the long Italian peninsula to just south of Rome to meet with friends. On the way, we stopped to fill up with propane, but our adapaters would not work with their pumps. We need propane to run the refrigerator when we are not plugged into electricity (which now does not work), heat our hot water, and to run the propane generator, which would give us electrical power in emergencies and recharge our batteries. Uh oh - major problem #2. Okay, our electrician wizard will help when we get there.

Unfortunately, the town is a beach resort and it would have been okay had we arrived in September when we were originally scheduled, but now we were here in the height of the summer vacation and there were cars everywhere and parked ine very direction on both sides of the street. We could barely fit down the road. We could find no parking closer than two kilometers from my friend's home, but they came to meet us. We had a wonderful evening reunion with dinner overlooking the ocean...they live in a fabulously beautiful spot. We met the electrical wizard and he knows his stuff, even though language is a bit of a problem. He will take us around the next day to places where we may be able to replace the magic electrical box and find a propane adapter.

Absolutely no luck. Everyone tried their best, but no adapters were to be found and the black box could be replaced, but it would take 3 weeks. Temps are in the 90s during the day and stay around 80 at night. We are parked in the public parking lot (legally), but not the safest place in the world, so we do not want to leave it there unoccupied. Jack makes some calls and finds that we do not need the adapter in Germany, so we decide we have to get the propane and we tearfully say goodbye to friends, apologize for the abbreviated visit, but must leave in order to get to Germany as quickly as possible so we will have propane to run the generator to recharge our batteries and to keep the refrigerator running.

Winery Estate

We stayed at a campground directly below this hilltop town, but could not take the time to go visit.

Vineyards for miles and miles

It took another couple of days to drive north through the Italian countryside, up through the narrowest part of Austria through Innsbruck and into Germany where we happily filled our propane tank with no problems. Hooray! One problem solved and at least we have a bit of energy backup, but we are still dealing with no electricity other than what is in our batteries. We are thinking that maybe Germany would be a good place to try again to find a replacement electrical box.

August 6: Southern Switzerland

We woke to a beautiful morning at our campground

We first headed back north to Interlaken in order to go around the lakes and mountains and head further south towards Zamatt. We drove through secondary roads over mountain passes where the roads were excellent and through little villages that had extremely narrow roads with house and building overhangs threatening our ability to make it through.

This lake created by the dam in the background was near the top of one of the mountain passes

The lake and roads as we left the lake to finish going over the pass

We aren't the only motorhome parked at the top of one pass

The German names are tough to read....

Beautiful flowers, ridiculously narrow roads with building overhangs that we had to watch for. No, this is not a side street in the town, it is the main road!

Huge difference in building materials from France's stone and brick to all wood - heavy and dark, old and sturdy

Most town homes are dark wood, but the church is bright white

We saw many of these wood outbuildings with an open space between the two floors - never did learn the whys or whatfors. They may have been early homes with animals downstairs and people upstairs???

We stayed the night in central southern Switzerland with every intention of going to Zamatt and the Matterhorn the next day. But early the next morning, we had no electricity. It was not any of our fuses or circuit breakers and the campground electricity was fine. Something was very wrong. Without electricity while staying at campgrounds, our batteries would eventually drain and then we would have problems keeping the refrigerator and water pump working. (For the RV literate, our generator would recharge the batteries, but generators are not allowed in campgrounds and if we were not driving long distances, it would be cumbersome to find a way to run a generator long enough to recharge.)

We were planning to visit friends in Italy, just south of Rome in a few weeks. I spoke with them and they said they had a local friend who was an electrical whizz that could help us. We decided to skip Zamatt and headed due south to Italy. Jack eventually found the problem - our magical voltage converter box failed - the wires inside were actually melted together. So, it became an issue of our friends fixing or replacing the box when we got there. Simple.

August 5: Jungfrau - Top of Europe

The train that takes us half way up the mountain where we catch another train to the top

We are staying in Lauterbrunnen, the closest town you can drive to access the Jungfrau Mountain. We took the bus that stopped right in front of the campground back into town to catch the train that takes us up to Klein-Scheidigg where we catch a train that goes one and a half hours through the interior of the mountains to get to the top of Jungrau.