I was in Baden-Württemberg (south-west Germany) for the past couple of weeks, enjoying excellent weather, good beer and food, while visiting churches, sundry Schlösser (including a giant one in Schwetzingen) and plenty of cake-shops.
I took a boat down the River Neckar in Heidelberg (an astonishingly delightful city), cycled a hundred kilometres through back-lanes and small villages (with a luxurious e-bike: it’s like you are always going down-hill) and visited a local zoo (with another cake-shop) and later, a huge old car, motorbike, plane and tank museum in Sinsheim.
The Sinsheim museum really is quite a thing. There's a Concorde one can climb inside and also a U-boat (which must have been a bother to obtain since the town is almost 600kms from the sea).
With a couple of obligatory stops in some Biergärten, the occasional schnapps and then another cake or two for good luck, I had a great trip and now weigh rather a lot.
My thanks to my kind hostess.
I didn’t (and don’t) think much of Barajas airport. I had to wait there for several hours queuing to get another ticket after my flight from Germany had been delayed by two idiots flying drones over the runways there. Barajas, which has several hundred squatters living in this decidedly uncomfortable airport, was spraying against a plague of bedbugs while I was visiting.
In Spain, we seem to be enjoying some outside weather as well, notably while protesting for this or that. The Good Folk from Madrid for example were spoilt for choice over this past weekend with a pro-Palestine demo, an anti-Sánchez rally and a pro-European march.
Frankly, I would have gone for an ice-cream instead.