Tübingen; Sunday, 21 September, 2025

I had a bit of a lie-in before checking out of the hotel and heading over towards the castle. Though my plans were soon to be thrown into chaos as the race that I’d noticed being advertised for today was in full flow and it meant that many of the streets in the city centre were either closed completely because they were the race track, and if you needed to cross them you had to wait for a gap in the participants.

Consequently, it took me a good 15 minutes to get from my hotel to the Anlagensee over by the Hauptbahnhof, and then once I’d looked round that another 5 minutes to get onto the small bridge linking the park area to the Neckarinsel.

Having looked at the race map it wasn’t going along the island so I used that as a way of getting west along the city centre towards the castle, but then found the race was using the tunnel, road and bridge immediately at the end of the island, so I had to wait a few minutes to get off the island, and then another 10 minutes to get across the mouth of the tunnel and to the steps that lead up the hill to the Schloßberg.

Finally, over an hour after leaving the hotel, I made it back to the castle to be able to have a look around the university’s museum, which was worth the effort as they have a spectacular collection of archaeology from 40,000 year old carved mammoth ivory through to a very large Egyptian collection and a massive hall filled with casts of famous statues and busts from classical civilisation.

Close to the museum, in the same courtyard of the castle are the former Castle Kitchens, which by the early 19th century had been converted into chemistry laboratories. In these labs the discipline of biochemistry was established, and discoveries here include Haemoglobin and in 1869 the discovery of nucleic acids which form DNA and RNA.

I spent a good couple of hours looking around the museums before it was time to try and head back down into town, though thankfully by now the race had finished and the only issues were for drivers with road closures still in place. I grabbed a quick bit to eat and then headed over to the bus station to catch the bus back direct to Stuttgart Airport.

The bus was a few minutes late getting to the airport due to tractors and cyclists on the narrow winding country roads it went along, but that didn’t matter as the inbound flight from London was late and my flight was on track for an hour’s delay.

In the end the delay crept a little bit further and we didn’t push back until we were 70 minutes behind schedule, of which very little was made up, arriving on stand at Heathrow exactly an hour late, but at least it was a stand with an actual jet bridge and not a bus gate.