Today I made some small mistakes that annoyed me, and I hope didn’t annoy Ton too much. We discussed our options for where to go today, and one of the options was Nuremberg, I checked the distance and told Ton it was 278 kilometers. So we decided to head to Nuremberg. The problem was I checked it on Apple maps instead of Google maps, and Apple maps is still set on miles. There is a big difference between 278 kilometers and 278 miles, so out trip today took about an hour and a half longer than I expected. Small mistake number 1. A little irritating.
I have a routine when I pack up the car. Ton takes care of the inside and I do the outside. I usually do things in a certain order so I don’t forget anything. Today I broke my routine and most importantly didn’t do the final walk around to double check everything that is part of the routine. We leave our shower shoes outside François when we park to save room and to keep the wet shoes out. Today I forgot to put them inside before we left and drove away and left them in Koblenz. Mistake number 2 irritating to me and this time to Ton also.
The campground we are staying at in Nuremberg is next to the soccer stadium here, and today they were playing their rival Dresden. The chants were incredibly loud. As we were driving in there was a very heavy police presence. The check in guy said there had been a pretty severe riot at a rivalry game last week in another city so the police weren’t taking any chances today.
Our plan was to take it easy the rest of the afternoon, and head into Nuremberg tomorrow. But while I was checking in Ton checked the weather app and it said there was a 100% chance of rain tomorrow. Since it is beautiful today we decided to hustle into town. We quickly set up and headed by the stadium on our way to the train station. The fans there were in full voice and we could tell it was approaching half time as the beer gardens outside the stadium were filling.
The weather today was beautiful and the people of Nuremberg were out in force. The main pedestrian streets in town were packed with everyone out enjoying a sunny spring day.
Nuremberg was much larger than I imagined. When I told Ton this she told me it was the second largest city in Bavaria. I had envisioned a small city like Koblenz, and instead found myself in a city nearly the size of Portland. (Probably small mistake number 3.)
Since we had not planned to come downtown until tomorrow, Ton did not have her usual plan for the visit. Today we winged it, just walking down the main street, and drifting off when we saw something interesting.
We did find some time for some German food, fried pork shoulder, Nuremberg sausages which are much smaller and leaner than the typical German Brautwurst, potato dumplings, and sauerkraut. We chased that down with a couple of beers.
It was a quick visit to Nuremberg and it is a city that probably deserves more than we gave it today, but this trip is supposed to be about Hungary and Slovakia so we made the decision to move on to the east tomorrow.