Friday: Into Thuringia

I didn't get to bed until 2am, it took that long to download and install the satnav map.  Now I have a fully working satnav, and life is rather dull as a result.

Porridge and green tea for breakfast, after a shower which was unusually luxurious for a camping, then I was packed up and on the road by 9.45.  First stop, Cologne.  Well, I just pulled over at the side of the road to snap this photo:

Disappointed that nobody shouted "Hey, look it's Martin Baker who played that amazing concert in the Cathedral on Tuesday!" I reset the Satnav for the province of Thuringia, Bach territory.  Then it was onto the autobahn and, gosh, was it tedious.  Heavy traffic all the way: endless trucks in the right lane doing 60mph and non-stop racing drivers doing twice that speed in the other lane.  So trying to do 70mph got rather tiring - constantly slowing to 60 approaching yet another lorry, waiting for a gap in the stream of racing cars and then pulling out and accellerating to a ridiculous speed in order not to get rear ended by the first of the next batch of speeders.  And so on, for several hours.  I pulled over into nearly every service station for a breather.

In the course of doing so I became aware of my latest addiction: a combination of Coca Cola zero and Magnum white ice cream.

My intention was to stop at Eisenach first, then Arnstadt, Weimar etc.  Just west of Eisenach I saw this from the motorway

see that interesting looking castle?

so I pulled off and went for a closer look and it turned out to be this:

Brandenburg ruin

(I would insert a video here but the wifi connection is too slow.)

I then went into Eisenach and had a look around.  A nice town:

And the birthplace of J S Bach:

By then I was too tired to do much more riding so I went in search of a camping to the south part of Thuringia and found this up in the hills:

I'm where the red dot is.  There's no phone signal unless I walk up the hill a bit, and no wifi.  But it's very peaceful.  Who needs a hotel when you can do this?

I'm worried that if I hang around this region tomorrow and look for Bach related stuff, much as I'd iike to, I'm going to get behind and won't make it into Turkey before I have to turn back towards Greece, so I'm going to do some route planning now.