App amusements

Well, that was excellent! Before I start posting Steinebach-to-Immenstadt photo dumps, some observations about two apps: Meteoblue and Komoot.

Locals recommended Meteoblue as the most accurate weather forecasting site. My cell phone kept translating the site from German to English, so I would get forecasts like this:

What day of the week is Mrs.? That would be Friday, Freitag, abbreviated Fr, which is an abbreviation for Frau, which is Mrs. in English. I'm not sure how my cell phone translator managed to get from Sa (Samstag) to sat (Saturday, obviously, but written as the past tense of sit). On Fridays, the sat forecast is not actually for morning--it's just translated that way because Morgen means both tomorrow and morning. I can't explain why Sunday, Sonntag, made it through the translator as So, with a capital S, rather than so, but I enjoy thinking of it as an exclamation. So. Despite these amusing quirks, auto-translate software has come a huge way since the last time we were in Germany on a sabbatical.  

Turns out the Meteoblue mobile website is psychologically more helpful than the app, with variably [in]accurate hourly predictions rather than variably [in]accurate 3-hour predictions. It took me a few days to notice that the website always includes a statement on the accuracy of the forecasts, from "the forecast for Friday is very stable and a high level of accuracy is assumed" to "the forecast for Sunday is wildly changeable and who knows what's going to happen."

The most accurate weather forecasting tool I found on my trek was in a yard just west of Roßhaupten:

Stone Age Weather Station:
Stone - dry = sunny
Stone - wet = rain
Stone - moving = stormy
Stone - in water = flooding
Stone - steamy = heat + rain
Stone - grey = hoarfrost
Stone - white = snow
Stone - not visible = fog
Stone - up above = world upside down
Stone - gone = thievery 

Komoot, which I used for route planning and navigation, was indispensable. It has a few faults--like directing me to cross a bridge in Immenstadt that was still under construction and did not yet span the river, and often telling me to go left when it meant right or right when it meant left, or remaining silent at two- or three-pronged forks in the road--but I eventually came to understand its left-right-straight [il]logic, and I relied on its excellent maps to walk 182 km (113 miles) across southern Bavaria. 

Apparently I turned on a Komoot setting that told it to speak to me in English when navigating; this provided regular doses of entertainment. Clearly Komoot has a limited database on how to pronounce English vowels and consonants. The letter y was consistently pronounced as in hyphen, so I was often told to continue straight for e.g. fiff-tye meters. Komoot always pronounced German street names as though they were in English, which was (1) totally unnecessary and (2) if you know even the bare minimum of how to pronounce words in German, amazingly hard to purposely botch as well as Komoot botches it. For example, Dießener Straße (roughly DEEssenehr SHTRAHsseh) becomes dyeSENNur STRASS and Bergweg (roughly BEHRG VAYG) becomes BRG whegg.