Bartholomä. Nope, we’d never heard of it either. Nor, I suspect, has anyone who lives much more than a snowball’s flight away. It’s not big, Bartholomä. Nor easy to pronounce – do you rhyme it with Bartholomew or Barcelona? Or, as the locals insist, some other way entirely that has me thinking our hotel must be miles away, when in fact it turns out to be the lights I can see across the dark, quiet, icy car park?
We’re here more by necessity than desire, far enough north that roads are open and roofs coping with their thick rugs of snow. But it looked good on the map: an isolated village on a high plateau surrounded by twisting, sweeping roads, roughly midway between Stuttgart and Ingolstadt. The homes, respectively, of…
