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.