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The lake is shrouded in mist as we leave the van to walk into Freidrichshafen at 10:20 but it is lifting all the time as we make our way through the park. We've come in today to visit a place Nick has often seen featured on TV documentaries but genuinely didn't know we were close t until Saturday night when we were planning our route.
The place in question is the Zeppelin Museum. The museum building stands on the harbour front near where the airships were built and tested in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is built in an art deco style with flat, white walls, rectangular windows and a square clock tower. Entry, by whatever concessions were applied, was €4 for both of us. We start in a widescreen cinema with a film of the history of Count Zeppelin's designs from 1880s, through to the demise of hydrogen filled airships following the Hindenburg disaster in 1937. Between those times each successive design grew larger and more complex, culminating in Graf Zeppelin which flew over 1,000,000 miles all around the world to Japan South America and the Arctic Circle, and the gigantic Hindenburg, at 245m long and 41.5m diameter. These vessels flew incredible distances at around 80mph. Airships were used in WW1 for reconnaissance and bombing, leading to the allies imposing restrictions on size.
Leaving the cinema we find ourselves under a replica section of fuselage with doped canvas tied tightly over the frame. Steps lead into the passenger area just as they did for passengers on the real thing. Ali climbs aboard and then has to follow a one way circuit back to Nick before we find a lift.
The passenger area is unique in design; it had to provide silver service and comfort to match the ocean liners but be built to minimum weights. It all looks surprisingly modern with bent-tube armchairs, aluminium tables and thin floor coverings. Windows in the lounge look down on the lower floors of the museum, but it's easy to imagine excited travellers looking down on the Alps, the Empire State Building or the speck of an ocean liner on a choppy Atlantic Ocean. The cabins are sized like railway sleeping compartments, with which contemporary travellers would be familiar, but these too have received the lightening process with bunk frames and ladders being fine perforated aluminium.
Leaving the passenger area a gallery looks into a section of fuselage with the incredibly light lattice work structure clear to see. Tiny triangular tubes, the size of a finger, are formed into larger lattices riveted together to form girders and huge hoops all braced by piano wire. The dry weight of Hindenburg, which was similar in size to RMS Queen Mary, was only 180 tonnes.
Another area has relics and wreckage from Lakehurst where Hindenburg burst into flames while coming in to land. An officer's jacket singed and holed, a clock with metal casing deformed by heat.
Around the museum are models and sections of various airships, engines, photos, paperwork, and artefacts like dinner services, uniforms and propaganda material.
We exit the museum and wander into town hoping to find lunch. There are numerous Italian restaurants but 'we're done Italian'. There are a few kebab stalls but eventually we find a good old bratwurst cafe, so bratwurst and chips it is. Not quite junk, and we convince ourselves it's regional.
Afterwards we find the ferryboat offices to enquire about a trip for tomorrow, then wander on along the quayside. As we should have guessed, wall to wall cafes and restaurants. We carry on through a park looking beautiful in the sun, the flower boarders still full of colour and the trees turning autumnal.
At the end of the park we find a terraced bar, decking and parasols right on the shore. A glass of local beer whiles away an hour, during which time the modern Zeppelin, built with carbon fibre in 1996, flies overhead.
A slow walk brings us back to the site for the evening.
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