We were back at ORC, south of Stuttgart, and spent the day waiting for our new transmission by visiting the surroundings. We first went to the abbey and castle of Bebenhausen near Tübingen, before we visited the town where Kepler was born.
The Cistercian monastery of Bebenhausen is one of the most beautiful and best-preserved medieval monastery complexes in Germany. It was founded in 1183 and became an important monastery of the Cistercians.
The cloister once was very important, with a huge area of land under its control. After the introduction of the Reformation in 1535 by Duke Ulrich von Württemberg, the convent was expelled, and the buildings had a changing use.
In 1806, King Friedrich of Württemberg started to used Bebenhausen for royal court hunts, converting some of the buildings as a royal hunting lodge.
King William II of Württemberg lived there until his death in 1921, his wife Princess Charlotte of Schaumburg-Lippe until her death in 1946.
We visited the castle with a guided tour, where we learned a lot about the history of Bebenhausen and the castle.
We made another visit to a little town called “Weil der Stadt”, a very strange name to us, which became famous because Johannes Kepler was born here in 1571. We didn’t go to the museum, but admired the old city wall and its timber-framed houses.
After we found out that the transmission couldn’t be changed as planned, as Mercedes had send the wrong part, we decided to go on a hike instead. There are things which cannot be changed – more on our next post!