A day with nothing in it that had to be done, which after the long drive and the longer day on the show ground was the whole point of it. Dry and warm, the sky changing its mind every half hour between flat grey and a clean, washed blue. We did not stir early.

In the late morning we walked out into the parkland, the same ground we had looked down on from the room on the first evening, when no photograph would hold the green. From inside it the green held itself perfectly well. We took about three quarters of an hour over it, an amble rather than a walk, along the gravel paths that thread between the tall spruce and out across the broad lawn, the wooded hills beyond the meadow closing the view in. We did not get as far as the spa quarter, nor did I much want to; the parkland was enough. Bad Bocklet is a spa town, which is what the ‘Bad’ in the name announces before you arrive, a small Bavarian market place of a few thousand people that has held the right to call itself a Markt since long before any of this was here. None of that pressed on the walk. It was simply a quiet town being quiet around us.

The one piece of practical business was the car. On the way out two days ago, at the first stop, I had noticed the headlight and indicator lens on the SL280 sitting loose in its housing, not falling out but no longer properly held, and I did not want it working itself free somewhere on the autobahn on the way home. So a short trip to a supermarket on the edge of town, a Netto, in search of tape. They had parcel tape and nothing else of any use to me. No duct tape, which is the thing one actually wants for a job like this. I bought the parcel tape and made do.

Back at the hotel I taped the lens, a stopgap and no more, enough to hold it steady for the run home. It is the sort of repair that looks worse than it is and works better than it looks. I will get the lens off properly once we are home, see whether a clip has gone or the lug has simply tired with age, and either fix it or replace it. The whole small episode left a clear note for the future: there should be a roll of duct tape in the van’s kit before we set off for the travelling years, not bought in a panic at a Netto in a strange town. An old vehicle wants steady small attention, and the things to put it right with ought to be aboard before they are wanted. The SL now, the Sprinter later, the principle is the same.

Dinner again at a quarter to seven, half board, and this time I wrote the wines down, having let the previous evening’s recommendations slip away unrecorded, which had nagged at me. Both were poured by the glass, the small two-tenths measure. The first was a Jubiläums-Cuvée, a dry white from Weingut Max Müller I at Volkach, classed as a Gutswein, the card promising yellow stone fruit and green apple, juicy, with a lively run of acidity, and delivering more or less what it promised, at seven euros fifty. The second was a Dürkheimer Feuerberg, a Blauer Portugieser, off-dry, from Weinkellerei Langenbach at Trier, ripe-fruited and full with a soft touch of residual sweetness, at seven euros even. No vintage shown on either, which I noticed and let pass.

The detail that rewarded a second look came afterwards, turning the two names over. The white is a Franconian wine, Volkach lying in Franken, which is as near to a local bottle as the week affords; the red, sold to us in the same breath as a local recommendation, comes by way of a Pfalz house at Trier, which is to say from somewhere else entirely. A ‘local’ wine that turns out to be half from another region is the kind of small slippage I would once have let go by. It grounds the glass in a place to know the difference, rather than leaving it as just a good white and a pleasant red.

Talk over dinner went back, as it has every evening, to the show: the forty-eight-volt storage, the recirculating shower, the diesel heater, the rest of the list. Nothing settled, nothing decided. We were only turning it over, the way one worries a stone in a pocket without meaning to throw it.