Well, it continued to rain all night & finally stopped about 9am - a total of 16 hours including over an hour of deafening, torrential stuff beating on the roof & stopping us sleeping! Today however was lovely (about time) with lots of sunshine & blue skies. We drove over the hill to lovely views of Lake Constance with the Swiss Alps in the distance and went to Friedrichshafen to visit the Zeppelin museum - Ferdinand von Zeppelin designed and built them here.


Although people think the Zeppelins were short lived, they flew for over 40 years and the airship made its maiden flight over the Bodensee in 1900, 3 and a half years before the Wright Brothers made their historic flight – just one of the things we learned. We had audio guides in English which really brought the history to life, particularly about the Hindenburg disaster, and it was hard to comprehend just how big those ships were: the Hindenburg was 245m long, more than twice as long as a football pitch.







R enjoyed it for all the technical aspects, and I liked the artefacts from the various voyages, plus the mock-up of part of the Hindenburg to walk through – first class travel was very luxurious. There was much information about its final voyage, when tragically it exploded and crashed in 1937, and there was lots of hands-on stuff for children to do (so of course I had a go too) then we walked into the town to find a cafe for lunch.
      






Our tickets also got us into the Dornier, an aerospace museum based on the inventions of Claude Dornier and the Airbus group, so we went there to look at planes/engines/other stuff. R of course loved it all, & I actually enjoyed it too - there were huge halls filled with examples of planes from all eras, including satellites and unmanned spacecraft. I achieved half an ambition by sitting in a helicopter - now all that remains is to go in one that actually moves!





Just up the road was the town of Ravensburg (of jigsaw fame) and having heard that it was a pretty place to see, we wandered around in the sunshine admiring the various towers and turrets. I liked the beautifully decorated Lederhaus (Leather house) in the main square, & the turret of the Green Tower, but those apart it actually wasn’t half as spectacular as the towns of the Romantic Road so we didn’t linger.