Saturday, July 3, 2010
Eng - The End Of The Road. - Saturday, July 3, 2010
Eng - The End Of The Road. - Saturday, July 3, 2010
We had started to walk back a gorge to a falls at Garmish-Partenkirchen (the site of the Olympics in 1938) in “02 but it was further than we thought and it was getting dark so we never did get to the falls. That is what we had planned today until we found out that there is a MAJOR motorcycle rally advertised today for Garmisch-Partenkirchen. There are 2 passes close by and we have to cross over the one in order to get to Garmish. You do not want to be on a pass when there is a motorcycle rally - they time the bikers from one side of the pass to the other we have heard and they just scream by you even on the sharp hairpin curves up and over the pass.
So we instead picked a spot on the map - a town called Eng - about 40 km away with a dead end road and a small town at the end - figured it might be a neat place to spend our last day here in Bavaria. Wow did it turn out to be a gem. For most of the way we followed a wide rocky river bed that twisted and turned as it meandered down from the Alpine glaciers high above. We figured there must be something back there since lots of bicycklers and a few cars were headed up there as well. As we neared the town the terrain changed to a flat grassy area with trees and we began to see cows off in the distance - many cows. Most of the farms we have seen here are small - 10 - 20 cows maximum. Here there were hundreds it seemed. We could see up ahead high mountain peaks with snow capped peaks. It was indeed the end of the road - the flat meadow was locked in by the mountains and the oly way out was to retrace our path. The village of ENG is really a hotel but beyond that the field opened up and we could see people walking back up toward the glacier toward a number of buildings with cattle high above and behind. So we decided to check it out. Back there were at least 8 barns about ½ the size of our barn back home. They turned out to be milking barns with Zimmer living quarters in the front of some of them. I counted milking stalls for 212 cows about 30 in each barn. Each barn had its own glass milking pipeline that emptied into about a 1000 litre (250 gal.) tank mounted on a motorized walk behind cart. The tanks are “driven” to a completely self contained cheese making barn in the middle of the cluster and there the Alpine milk is made into cheese - saw a pig pen and suppose the pigs get the leftovers. Most barn fronts are rentable as Zimmers for a night or more to visitors who wish to become part of the process. Some living quarters for the help as well. IOf you look closely you may be able to see more cows above the buildings just below the treeline and the snow.
There was no sign of hay storage so this must have been a high alpine dairy we have heard about and seen from a distance but have never been able to experience it so close up. Of coarse they had a store where we sampled several types of cheeses they make. Lunch was under a shade a tree in the pasture field with the cows. We drove back down to the valley floor knowing we had experienced a gem.
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