From Ravensburg jigsaws to Zeppelin Airships

An interesting sculpture in Wangen

Left, right, up or down? Which way to go? West a little, to Lake Constance, before beginning the journey north, a vague plan. Wangen im Allgäu, the first of four one night stands. Gas had become important after a clunk this morning as the large bottle ran out and the heating went off. LPG is plentiful in Germany, but always seems a little hard to find just when we need it, so much so we actually went 10 minutes in the wrong direction to fill, just to get the job done. An hour and a half drive followed, but it was pretty and pleasant, as was Wangen. Another old town, though we’ve seen a few of those now, a park up with free electric, and even the bread van in the morning (stellplatz location: 47°40'54.1"N 9°50'02.1"E).

This is a small church in Wangen with many painted panels on the ceiling depicting various scenes from the bible. On entry you collect a mirror to help you examine the panels without having to strain your neck

Main street in Wangen. A beautiful well kept old town

Ravensburg next, though we both found this a bit of a let down. It’s the centre of jigsaw production, but not much was made of this in the town, though we did pop into the shop and try to work out who would spend in excess of €300 on a 42000 piece, 6m jigsaw, and where they would then do it! We did go to the Humpis quarter museum, a set of seven buildings and their story and the story’s of the normal, every day people who had lived there. It was interesting but the audio guide contained so much information our heads exploded (stellplatz location: 47°46'54.6"N 9°35'59.3"E).

A bit of a misty day in Wangen, but this photo is taken on top of a hill with a building that is now a Youth Hostel. There used to be a  castle here and in the 1400's the town built that tower you can just see there improbably high (particularly for the period) just so the castle didn't over shadow it

Ravensburg 40320 piece jigsaw anyone? Its 6.80m x 1.92m

Friedrichshafen on Saturday where the zeppelin was developed and built. Not much of an old town as it was bombed in the war, which I guess is not surprising, but a very interesting museum. Lots of information, and enough in English, a life size model of part of the Hindenburg for you to walk through and much about the conspiracies and theories as to why it exploded. A lovely lake front walk with mountain views into Switzerland and Austria, and finally it has warmed up a little (stellplatz location: 47°39'00.1"N 9°29'48.0"E).

On the lakefront at Friedrichshafen wit the Swiss and Austrian Alps visible on the other side

See that tower there on the end of that pier?.....

Further round the lake today to Meersburg, an old town with two castles and built on a hill. It’s strange to realise how many of the towns have been flat. A ‘lunch’ was on the cards for today, but having walked up and down and roundabout twice we nearly called it off, every restaurant was either Italian, or jolly expensive, or both. We finally ended up in a little cafe, that was actually much nicer on the inside than it looked from the outside, with a lovely bloke who despite being busy still had time to explain what everything was and have a laugh. I’ve enjoyed what we’ve eaten out, on the three occasions we’ve eaten a proper German meal, but I’m glad we don’t have to eat it every day! German wine, fizz and gluwein however is another story....

This is what Friedrichshafen looks like from the top of it

Inside the Zeppelin Museum, this is a recreation of part of the Hindenburg

There was even a cat to say hello to on the way to, and from town, she was very cute, but Brian has stopped taking photos of me and cats even though I can probably count strokes on two hands (stellplatz location: 47°42'03.7"N 9°16'04.1"E).

Some notes from Brian: Friedrichshafen made a great impression on me, not only for the Zeppelin airship but for the excellence in mechanical engineering for which the town is rightly proud and as a mechanical engineer myself I can see what an exciting place it would be to work. Zeppelin Systems GmbH is still a big manufacturing company today, employing 9000 people and with a turnover of €2.9 billion, although these days mainly concerned with bulk materials handling. The airships they manufacture today use carbon fibre frames rather than the aluminium, rivetted together originals.

Extract from one of the newspapers on display showing the sizes of the Hindenburg and Graf Zeppelin airships

Inside the structure of the Hindenburg part recreation

Also in the town is the engine manufacturing company MTU, that used to be known as Maybach and, at one time used to manufacture a luxury car known as the German Rolls Royce. Today MTU is owned by Rolls Royce Systems and still manufactures huge engines for marine and rail, fabulous, to me proper engineering that I'd have loved to have been involved with. Read their history here:  https://www.mtu-online.com/great-britain/company/history/. They are another huge company, employing 10,000 people worldwide.

A boarding card for the airship

The third company that was of personal interest to me as I used to complete with them in a very small sector of their products, and that is ZF, or to give it its original name: Zahnradfabrik Friedrichshafen (https://www.zf.com/). This is a huge company worldwide, employing 149,000 people in 230 locations around the world and with a turnover of €36.9 billion. They are mainly concerned in gears and transmissions for busses, trucks, cars and industrial machines, and its the industrial side that I can across them as a competitor to the French company Redex, that I used to work with.

All of these companies originally came to Friedrichshafen in the early 1900's to support and supply parts for the Zeppelin Airshirps, as well as Maybach producing engines for tanks, ships, military vehicles, airships and airplanes, and ZF transmissions for the same. It is not surprising therefore that the town became a major target for bombing in the last war and 85% of the town was destroyed almost leading to the loss of the technology. It was rebuilt after the war and has again become a centre for excellence the world over and has to be admired. It really is German mechanical engineering at its best. No wonder ZF were such a difficult company to complete with!

Jackie goes up into the Hindenburg

The complete day for me would have been a tour of one of the factories, but that was not to be, I made do with the Zeppelin Museum which, itself was very informative and an exciting place to visit.

This apparently is exactly how it looked to travel by airship. It took 2 days to fly the Atlantic in absolute luxury (for the time). It could take 50 passengers, which required between 40 and 50 crew. The windows on the right would give a birds eye view of the ocean and land below. The cost of a trip across the Atlantic was equivalent to half a years salary of one of the construction workers

Luxury living? One of the bedrooms on the airship

Photograph inside the airship showing one of the hydrogen airbags in position. The horizontal section at the bottom would be the passenger quarters shown in the above photos. Imagine having all that flammable hydrogen above your head!

Photograph of maintenance people on the outside of the ship making running repairs during flight

A photo of the New York Times on the day of the disaster of the Hindenburg on 6th May 1937

A chair from the doomed airship

Just out of interest, here's a few information panels from the museum that I thought worthwhile inserting: