Thursday

Today we had to reach Steinach in Switzerland. As it was raining in the morning we had to put on our rainwear for the first time. After having crossed the German-Austrian border we passed the interesting outdoor swimming pool "Mili" which is a building on stilts in the lake and made from wood. It was build in 1825 as a military facility for young recruits and is the oldest swimming pool on the lake. This pool has the advantage that you can get into the deep water by walking down over a stair. It is not necessary to go from the lake shore into the deeper water where you can swim. Without bathing shoes this can be very unpleasant, because the shores of the lake Constance are stony at the most places.

We passed the open air theatre in Bregenz, where they gave the opera"Tosca". According to day time and weather it was total empty just like the "Mili". We couldn't had had the opera going anyway (no evening wear in our bike bags).




Beyond Bregenz we crossed the alluvial fan of the Upper Rhine river, where it flows in the Lake Constance (flows out at Constance). The fan was created by a correction of the "Old Rhine" river, which flew in the lake at the Austrian-Swiss border at Rheineck. About 100 years ago they dug a canal to derive the water into the lake in a short and direct way ("New Rhine"). The reason was that the pebble-bearing Old Rhine often was blocked up, burst its banks and deluged the fields. Results were crop failure and famine. The canal of the New Upper Rhine has the advantage, that they can keep the flow velocity high more easily by dredging. Nearby we saw an automatic device which had the purpose to clean the river permanently from swimming stuff like branches, reeds etc. In the triangle of Old Rhine, New Rhine and Lake was created a wonderful nature reserve with many interesting plants and birds.


Via the mayor town Rorschach / Switzerland we eventually reached Steinach where we moved into the fine little Hotel "II Fiore" (Italian: The flower). Seen from the outside as a timber-worked building it looks rather antique but inside it is quite a modern hotel with a good restaurant.




But we didn't have our dinner there.We did a little walk through the village to the See and found a very good seafood restaurant, which obviously was very well-liked by the villagers. It had some fish meals on its menu list and each one was made from fresh fish. There only was one meal made from deep frozen fish. We had Bodensee-Felchen (Coregonus lavaretus wartmann, this is a species of freshwater fish in the salmon family (family Salmonidae), which is numerous in the Lake Constance). We had it as catch of the day with fried potatoes and apple must (delicious !).



On our walk we passed the little "old washhouse", which is a couple of hundred years old and affectionately restored. At former times a public washhouse certainly was a necessary facility. It is one thing to wash one's dirty linen in public, but it is a different matter to do that job it in rain and snow, like the weather very often is in Switzerland, especially in fall and winter. On the wall of the washhouse is written "Kleines Haus, kleine Sorge !" (Small house, small care !) I don't know if that is true, but I do know for sure "Big house, big worry !" Perhaps the conservator of Steinach can confirm that regarding the big old storehouse which is a stone's throw away from the old washhouse. This house ("Gredhaus") is 500 years old also and well equipped with firing ports: So the storehouse guards had better working conditions.