Travel: Stuttgart and Konstanz

Continuing the series of my Eclipse Summit trip, after the conference finished in Ludwisburg with the usual drinking with the IONA and ObjectWeb/O2 folks in the biergartens (this is becoming a tradition) I drove to the near Stuttgart to drop Brett in the train station. Traffic was horrible, maybe due to the train strike everybody had to drive to work, but it took us forever. Besides that, driving in the autobahn is a pleasure when there’s no traffic, no speed limit, so I got up to 190 km/h with the crappy Volkswagen Touran that we got in the rental car agency, that got Brett a bit scared.

Stuttgart is home of Mercedes and Porsche. I went to the Porsche museum, but as it happened last year with the BMW museum in Munich it was a small place while they were making a big building explicitly dedicated to it. Still it’s always amazing to see a Porsche Carrera GT.

In the border between Germany and Switzerland it’s Konstanz, known for being in the Lake Constance, "der Bodensee" in German, and very well conserved as due to its proximity to Switzerland border it avoided being bombed by the allies forces. I rode for first time a ferry to cross the Lake in the car, going to the Neuschwanstein Castle, but that place deserves another entry 😉

Stuttgart Schlossplatz