BADEN WÜRTTENBURG REGION - GERMANY

Departing from Ljubljana in the late afternoon, I arrived in Munich (my intended destination) at 2am the following morning. After quering one of the passengers as to the exact location of Öhringen, my final destination (he wasn´t able to provide enormous help, but suggested that the fact that he lived in Stuttgart and had heard of Öhringen, suggested that I was better off continuing to Stuttgart) I decided to jump back on the bus (despite having only purchased a ticket as far as Munich). So, after a bit of covert operations work (i.e. hurling my bag to other side of the luggage compartment to make it look like I was actually going to Stuttgart) and 2 more hours on the bus, I arrived in Stuttgart at a slightly less disagreeable hour of 4am !!

Still not exactly sure where I was headed, I enquired about trains to Öhringen, where I discovered I had made the right move and that I was only 1.5 hours from where my friend Ludwig lived. However, given the hour, I decided not to continue immediately and instead just chilled in the train station until about 6am before dumping my stuff in a locker and going for a wander around the city. I didn´t find so much of interest during my walk around the city centre and after a few hours or so, found a quiet cemetary, with a most appealing park, where I had a bite to eat and a bit of shute-eye before I was awoken by a passing rain shower and a squirrel depositing uneaten portions of his nut on my head !

I wandered back to the city centre and enquired at the tourist information office as to what I might occupy myself with for the remainder of the day. I was most delighted to find that both Mercedes-Benz and Porsche heralded from Stuttgart and so took myself out to the newly renovated and very impressive Mercedes-Benz museum. The museum contained an extremely detailed account of not only the history of the company but also included hundreds of cars, trucks and other vehicles from different periods throughout the 20th century. However, after a few hours of taking in all that was on offer (it was impossible to visit all parts of the museum in a single sitting) I returned to the train station and arrived in Ohringen a short while later.