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.