The TV weather forecast last night showed temperatures in the East of the country to 34 – but also issued a severe weather warning for heavy rain and thunderstorms, for a large part of the country.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.fred-hart.de\/itzehoe2018\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/05\/DSCN3858-300x225.jpg\")
The day started off dry and very warm. For breakfast, I found a bakery just around the corner from the hotel and had a croissant and a cold chocolate milkshake (too hot for a hot chocolate). After walking around the city, through the shopping district and then back to the Domplatz (Cathedral Sq.) a different way, I needed another drink.<\/p>\n
The market was on so I had a walk around that, and I went up to the Cathedral to investigate inside that. Yet another drink – the Cathedral Caf\u00e9 served me with my favourite cold drink: an Eisschocolade (effectively, a chocolate milkshake with a scoop of vanilla ice cream) which I drank while sitting on the steps of the Cathedral.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.fred-hart.de\/itzehoe2018\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/05\/DSCN3871-225x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
I wanted to stay for longer but had another long drive ahead of me. So not long after midday I had paid the fee for parking in the multi-storey and was on the road. Before leaving the region, I drove in to the forest to visit the highest point in Th\u00fcringen.<\/p>\n
The drive from the Autobahn up to the forest had some very interesting scenery, but by the time I had worked out where to park to visit the highest point of the region, it was apparent that the forecast last night was correct.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.fred-hart.de\/itzehoe2018\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/05\/DSCN3886-300x225.jpg\")
The storm was coming in fast. On one one side of the road, it was still Sunny. On the other, it was raining. A loud rumble of thunder and 15 minutes later, the Sun was nowhere to be seen. But by the time I was a 1km walk from the car, taking shelter in a caf\u00e9 along with, it seemed, the rest of the world.<\/p>\n
Back at the car, my coat had kept most of me dry but my shorts were soaked, as were my feet. I changed my shoes and socks easily (I keep my posh shoes in the car for occasions when I need to be smart – not great for driving but they’ll do). There wasn’t anywhere near the car park where I could change that easily – so to dry my shorts, I\u00a0 sat in the car for about 5 minutes, with the fan vents aimed at my leg.<\/p>\n
I set the sat nav for Cochem and got on the road. Needless to say that it stopped raining soon after. The journey to Cochem went through all types of weather – One minute it was dry, the next minute it was raining a little, then there was some forked lightening and the Autobahn was more like a river.<\/p>\n
Despite the horrible weather which slowed me right down in places, it was a fairly clear run and I did find a few spots where I could put my foot down. At one point, I was doing about 157km\/h and a Porsche overtook me – I might as well have been standing still.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.fred-hart.de\/itzehoe2018\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/05\/DSCN3900-300x225.jpg\")
By the time I reached Cochem in the late afternoon (it was around 7 by the time I left the Autobahn), it was hot and Sunny again. I found my hotel with no difficulty, collected my key and went to find something for dinner.<\/p>\n
It was 20:45 by the time I went out; the trouble is that outside the big cities, restaurants in Germany tend to close quite early – I don’t know why… 9pm is nothing, really. It’s about the earliest I’d consider eating normally! But I managed to find somewhere still serving food.<\/p>\n
Tonight is my last night in Germany – the last week has flown by… but it’s only 2 months before I’m back on the road again heading to Norway, with plenty of stops in Germany too.<\/p>\n
I’ve got a long drive tomorrow – so I’m off to bed.<\/p>\n
Gute Nacht.<\/p>\n
FH.<\/p>\n
Today’s Mileage:<\/strong> 271 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The TV weather forecast last night showed temperatures in the East of the country to 34 – but also issued a severe weather warning for heavy rain and thunderstorms, for a large part of the country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":180,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[55,53,56],"tags":[21,60,59,63,61,57,58,64,62],"class_list":["post-179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cochem","category-erfurt","category-thueringer-wald","tag-cathedral","tag-cochem","tag-erfurt","tag-forest","tag-reheinland-pfalz","tag-thueringer-wald","tag-thuringian-forest","tag-walk","tag-weather"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/www.fred-hart.de\/itzehoe2018\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/05\/DSCN3883.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fred-hart.de\/itzehoe2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fred-hart.de\/itzehoe2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fred-hart.de\/itzehoe2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fred-hart.de\/itzehoe2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fred-hart.de\/itzehoe2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.fred-hart.de\/itzehoe2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":186,"href":"http:\/\/www.fred-hart.de\/itzehoe2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions\/186"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fred-hart.de\/itzehoe2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fred-hart.de\/itzehoe2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fred-hart.de\/itzehoe2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fred-hart.de\/itzehoe2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nAccumulative Mileage:<\/strong> 1500.6<\/p>\n