Blankenheim and Bad Munstereifel - Saturday 10th October 2009

After going to bed at child o’clock we got up at OAP o’clock, we were awake at about 6 but dozed until 7ish.

We decided to head out to Blankenheim, we had a leaflet for it that we picked up somewhere so decided to have a look and see what it was all about.

Arriving pretty early on a Saturday we thought that it was a bit quiet, it looked like it could be a pretty busy coach party style town so we got on and had a good wander about before the expected crowds rolled in.

I suppose I would describe Blankenheim as a bit like Monschau but smaller, a lot less touristy and it is not permanently Christmas. It has lovely cobbled streets and only one building, albeit a lovely one, was covered in scaffolding. The rest were a mixture of Tudor style white with beams and more modern, shapely concrete, 50’s style ones which are common as post war rebuilds in West Germany.

The town has a large “Berg” or castle overlooking the town. This one unfortunately was not open to the public and was instead a youth hostel (inhabited today by the local scout group).

The castle’s once ornate gardens were now a meadow inhabited by local horses (who were very pretty indeed). The region has a large amount of sandy/light brown horses with really blonde manes and tails. There’s a field of these sandy ponies not far from Sunparks, I reeeeaaaaallly want to go and see them. When we drove back today, they were walking over to investigate a carload of hikers that had stopped near them, so I think they’re very friendly!

We went for a short nature walk and saw some pretty little snails all over everything, we had to be pretty careful as most of them were very young and VERY small.

I’m sure Anna will chip in with some more! Oh the snails! They were brilliant! There were loads of them, in all kinds of colours – yellow, orange, swirly stripes and all kinds of sizes from a couple of centimetres down to barely five millimetres! There were so cute! The path we found them on also had some proper fairy sized mushrooms and some very odd snails that were quite oddly shaped – they were small with very narrow conical shells, we tried getting a photo, but they were so small the camera had trouble focussing on them.

Back into town and the coach parties had not arrived, nor had anyone else really, I’m sure towards Christmas time the place will be heaving but October is good if you want a hassle free wander.

Bad Munstereifel is on the river Erft and is also similar to Monchau but bigger. The streets are wider and there is a definite route through where Monchau is a bit twisty with loads of little snickets.

Munstereifel is the place to go for food and shops. There was far greater choice and it was a lot busier than Blankenheim.

I can imagine the place being completely mental come Christmas as thousands of little old ladies from miles around are shipped in one coach at a time to spend their hard earned retirement monies on useless tat that they will never use and try to palm off on unsuspecting family members.

There was a cool little ninja kitty on our walk through town – he was trying to get in a closed window, as I don’t think he’d realised it wasn’t the one he came out of. As we watched he was doing that crazy look that kitties do and I was a little worried that he might jump off the windowsill after whatever bug had caught his attention, but then he managed to figure out the way back over the canopy to the open window. He was a silly kitty.

We stopped off for lunch at a place called Amadeus where we both ordered the food of glory and wonder, schnitzel. This was Champignonrahmschnitzel to be precise which came with a starter salad and a huge side of chips. YUM YUM YUM YUM YUM (repeat till fade).

After basking in the glow of awesome and joy for an hour, and trying a new non-beer called Stauder (from Essen), we left and made our way back to the car to come home.

The way back was rainy, sunny and foggy (all at different times, duh!) and was on some of the best roads ever. They seem to have resurfaced everything recently and we made rapid (but safe) progress down to Nurburg (where we got a crate of Bitburg for Katie and various non-beers for me).

Nurberg is great but no ring today as there was BMW racing on (which could be heard from miles away echoing round the valley).

About 15 minutes later we were in Sunparks and snoozing. Tonight we went to the swimming pool, which is a lot smaller than Vielsalm, but it was worth it to fill an evening and wake up a little before heading back to the flat for dinner and bad comedy on the TV.