Germany

Frankfurt to Gengenbach

The  alarm  goes off really really early.  We are up and dashing around while the cat grooms herself on top of the luggage. We aren’t bringing suitcases but rather three over-stuffed backpacks, a taped up cardboard box of our sleeping bags, tent and hiking boots, and 2 carry-ons.  After a fast eaten breakfast of everything strategically left over in the fridge and a quick a wipe down of the shelves and walk through of the house there is a knock on the door from our ride to the airport. We load up his car, say good bye to the cat who says she doesn’t care, and lock up leaving the key in the hiding place we’d arranged with the renter. The Austin airport is running efficiently and we quickly check our bags and go through security.  First there is a small plane to Dallas where we board a huge 747 to Germany.  On the plane I play Tetrus for the first time, a game I am not very good at.  I also watch Date Night giggling throughout painfully aware that this behavior marks me as irredeemably middle-aged.  And married. Kaitlin watched the movie too stone serious with the occasional glance in my direction as if to say, “You find THIS  amusing?” But then she plays a mean game of Tetrus. A few horrid hours of pretending I was asleep in the rock hard airplane seat and then we are there – Frankfurt airport picking up our backpacks and looking for the train station to take us on to Gengenbach.

Paul had made our reservation for the train from Frankfurt to Gengenbach over three hours later than when the plane was scheduled to arrive to make some slack time in case the plane should be delayed. In retrospect this was silly – I don’t think anything would dare be late in Germany no matter how many times the Germans we talked to during our time there complained about the slip-shod nature of their train system. Several times we talked to people who dourly went on as if the whole Eurail system was sliding downhill into perpetual delay and break down and then promptly get on the 7:38 train at 7:38 on their way to make a 9:53 connection which would happen at and only at 9:53. But we didn’t know this yet so we sat at the right bench – the train schedule being made out so that we knew even which bench to get on the train from – for three hours fighting with our jet lag.

If you are going to sit on a bench for three hours in a stupor the Frankfurt train station is a great place to do it. The station is large and industrial urban with windows that look out onto busy streets in a layered effect so that if one is sitting there in a semi-dreamstate it appears as if one is inside of a modern art performance piece where grey shadows of people with briefcases and taxis pass by far away while closer in long red trains very quietly come, stop and go.  When the trains stop hundreds of people get off and on but everything is still a muffled quiet. I’m not saying that hundreds of people at a train station all decided not to talk, I’m saying that they didn’t talk and their shoes didn’t make little clicking noises, and the suitcases didn’t rattle as they rolled along, and the babies didn’t cry, and the newspapers didn’t rustle. It was a very quiet three hours followed by a silent ride on a full train.

I got serious about visiting Gengenbach after sifting though several hours of photos of Germany on Flickr.  Our neighbors are from Germany and over the years we have helped them plan sightseeing trips to places in the US like the Rocky Mountains or the Pacific Northwest.  They were delighted to return the favor and we invited them over to have a good map-pouring session with tea and cookies.   Their suggestions about where to go if we were most interested in landscape, had no car, and were only to be there for a few days was to see the Rhine river valley. “Hmm”, we said, “Okay.”  ”Maybe also the Black Forest?”  Yes! The Black Forest! As a child I had heard of a place called the Black Forest. Back then it was a magic place of woodcutters and mist where the fairy tales came from.  Now, after our neighbors left and I went online to look up pictures of it, I realized it was also a place famous for cake. If you type “Black Forest Cake” into the Flickr search engine you will get an eyeful.  I looked up town after town that was along the train rails finally settling on Gengenbach as where we must go to eat some cake.

There are several train changes that must be made to get from Frankfurt to Gengenbach. At each exchange we managed to foul up the German train riding etiquette in a new way. I don’t really want to go into it here but it would be safe to say that our learning curve was slow and while no one actually said anything the glares were really quite loud and probably deserved. But we weren’t thrown off and did arrive at Gengenbach right on time and were allowed into the hotel room that Paul had reserved back in the states although they let us know that we had done that all wrong too. We dumped our backpacks onto the hotel beds and headed out to see the town and forest.

Paul on the balcony of our hotel: the Pfeffer and Salz.

Directions.

I like the Black Forest and spent as much time as I felt I could walking through it. I found no witches or wolves in Grandma’s clothing although there were a lot of very large orange slugs and at one place, right in the middle of nowhere, a tiny swimming pool of turquoise water.  It looked like a giant’s bright piece of jewelry dropped in the forest then forgotten but was more probably a mineral bath.

I liked Gengenbach too even if I did quickly begin to suspect that we were in a retirement tourist town.  The town follows a hillside down to its base with a stream joining it fully – sometimes this stream was inside its own stream banks with flowers planted up its sides and sometimes when it bored of that it ran right over the town street’s cobblestones which were grooved to accommodate it. I could see from a hillside that the town stretched somewhat farther than the super quaint old city center but not very far. For the most part Gengenbach  seemed content to let its ambitions go no further than to be pretty for the tourists.

Pause for a food rhapsody:  I have never had such good bread! The white bread, the wheat bread, the black bread, the rye. The rolls! Seasme seed, poppy seed, multi-grain. I don’t think “Man can not live by bread alone.” includes German bread. Black Forest ham also gets its own chorus.  I don’t speak German and Gengenbach is a town with few English speakers so I would choose the most interesting looking word on a menu and order that. One time I got a roll, a piece of ham and a pickle. Best dinner ever.  There is also an abundance of Nutella here which seems like a good idea to me.  And I got some Black Forest Cake too.  It was very pretty but couldn’t compete with the bread and ham.

One other thing about Gengenbach: they take their woodpiles very seriously:

Cochem on the Mosel

After Gengenbach it was to be Cochem on the Mosel.

The next morning Paul and I woke up early. We talked at normal volume not minding if we woke Kaitlin up as an early morning get away would be a good thing. She soon got up reminding us that if we talked that loud we would wake her up.  We headed down to the hotel’s restaurant for our complimentary breakfast (see previous post for how I feel about the food we got in Germany) We had a pleasant hour or so lingering over our coffee and rolls before going back to the hotel room where we were confronted by our backpacks. The night before we had strewn our stuff all over the hotel room in a backpack repacking frenzy.  Our packs seemed to be absurdly heavy and surely there was something to discard. The problem was that we weren’t just packing for a 3 weeks journey through Germany and Norway much of it camping – we were also in some cases packing for the 4 month stay in Bergen and Kaitlin’s stay in France so not much weight was reduced for all the time taken.  Our packs just were going to be very heavy and bulky and annoying to take on trains.  So we put them on and started the half hour walk down the hill through the pretty town with its pretty steam to the train.

We had four trains to take to get from Gengenbach to Cochem. This took us from 10:51 to 2:58. That is how long the schedule said it would take and that is how long it took.  Our learning curve on train riding etiquette was finally steepening and we made far fewer gaffes. This was heartening as was the fact that we were able to figure out fairly quickly that we needed to take the pedestrian bridge to the other side of the freeway and river to get to the Cochem youth hostel.

I do not like youth hostels. Say “youth hostel” to me and I don’t think, “Oh cool! Cheap place to meet and mingle with the young adventurers of the world!” Instead I think, “Someone will probably accidentally pee on me.”  Our neighbors had been so adamant that German youth hostels were not like that and were actually very good places to stay for a night that we decided to chance it but I was very dubious as we tromped along.  Paul was saying, “No we do have our own rooms, I know, I talked to them.” and I was saying, “I don’t think you can have your own room in a youth hostel, they’re 6 to 8 beds to a room at least, one bathroom per floor. They smell bad you know. Really bad.” and Kaitlin was pointing out a castle on a hill, huge fish in the Mosel and a beautiful afternoon sky.  The actual youth hostel turned out to be clean and cheerful – as in immaculate and smurf-like – with happy families waving to each other as the sun streamed down through large skylights.  There were roses. There was ice cream.  Pretty music played.  We did have our own room with clean bedding and (oh joy!) our own bathroom.  No one even came close to peeing on me the whole time.

Welcome to the Cochem Youth Hostel

Sheep Gummies on the pillows.

Cochem itself was almost an afterthought to me after the glory of the youth hostel. A nice town along the line of Gengenbach – geared to tourists, lots of retired people, half-timbered houses tightly packed along cobblestone streets with the bottom floor of each building devoted to a café or tee-shirt shop, flower boxes, lots of pedestrians and the occasional large stone church. We stayed for two days hanging out in the town and walking up and down the river watching groups of ducklings paddle about and tourist boats glide by.  My main focus was again on the food and drink. Weiner schnitzel and sauerkraut and potatoes and bread and good beer! This area of the Mosel is famous for its Riesling wine and the vineyards make a bright green band as they cling to the sides of the very steep hills on each side of the wide slow moving river.  We took a winery tour with wine tasting afterward. We bought a bottle of the winery’s “good stuff” for cheaper than we ever could have at home and added its bulk and weight to the backpacks.

Lubeck and the Night Ferry

Our last morning in Cochem was a bit hurried.  We got the backpacks ready the night before and went down to the youth hostel’s dining room for breakfast as soon as it opened. The dining hall was as smurfily cheery as the rest of the place: skylights brightened the butter yellow chairs lining long white tables with place cards on them telling each family where to sit while kids wriggled in their seats as the food was set on buffet tables: dark and light bread rolls, ham, salami, cheese slices, butter, jams, Nutella, hard boiled eggs, cereal, milk, juice, coffee and tea. (pic) I could have lingered a long time but our train connection was a bit tight so we ordered a bagged lunch from the hostel, got our backpacks and prepared to go.  Then we waited and waited at the hostel front desk for the bagged lunches to show up while the lunches themselves waited for us to pick them up back at our place card on the table. We waited some more and I started worrying about the time passing since by this point I knew that the train would leave right on time so we daren’t be late. Finally we got it figured out. Communication can be a bit hard if we speak German as badly as they spoke English. It was pouring rain and we were hustling along by the time we left but a miracle happened and this one time the train was 10 minutes late!

Our plan was to take the train from Cochem to Lubeck, then board a night ferry to cross the Baltic Sea to Malmo. From Malmo we would continue via Eurail to Oslo. This takes roughly 48 hours when all the connecting time is added in. I couldn’t wait: day one went right through the industrial heartland of Germany which I was very interested in seeing, and day two took a lot of time going through Sweden which I was just as interested in.  The German industrial core was a bit of a disappointment in that I don’t think you can really see much from the train. Either that or there really isn’t much to see. There were quite a few factories but they were terribly tidy with even the scrap heaps swept up into neat piles. It was as if they were clinging too closely to the an architect’s idealized rendering.  I was hoping for many more smokestacks and some smog. We passed through Koblentz, Bonn, Koln, Dusseldorf, Duisburg, Essen, and Osnabruck. From Munster to Bremen the landscape picked up a Dutch flavor with pretty fields outlined with rows of symmetrical trees and red brick houses many of them with solar panels on their roofs. Then from Bremen to Hamburg where we needed to get off and switch trains.  The Hamburg train station was great! Gritty and huge and loud and super crowded. The people still weren’t talking but the ambient city noise rose above the human silence making a techno beat of train wheels and outside sirens. Since the beginning of the trip Kaitlin had wanted to get a hamburger in Hamburg so she and I set off to find one in the station’s food court. Only MacDonald’s had hamburgers! We stood in the fast food restaurant’s very long line for a few minutes before I realized there was no way we would have time to order and also make our connection so we returned empty handed to Paul and our pile of backpacks.

From Hamburg to Lubeck once a flourishing city of the Hanseatic league. I had been curious to see it but the train didn’t leave us off in the city but rather at a puzzlingly desolate bus stop at the end of the train line.  Evening was coming on and we sat with our backpacks off to the side of the bus stop looking at the scrubby trees across the road.  One bus came and went while our backs were turned to it because we were worriedly trying to figure out the bus schedule. The next bus had an impatient driver that again spoke English as badly as we spoke German.  “Yes, yes, the ferry.” he said so we got on.  The bus stopped at the next stop and many young people with large backpacks and bedrolls and rock climbing equipment got on.  They crammed on like clowns into a circus car until we were all scrunched up against each other with sleeping bags banging into little old ladies and ski poles threatening to poke out an eye. As soon as they were all on and the bus pulled onto the road I realized that that was where we were supposed to get off!  I started communicating my concern with Paul and the gentleman in front of me mercifully not only understood English but took the time to do something about our situation by pulling on a cord, stopping the bus, and getting off with us. Of course you try to get three enormous overstuffed dumb backpacks that you haven’t been able to condense down in size no matter how much repacking you’ve done off of a bus full of inattentive high school kids who are too busy whacking each other with their backpacks to bother about letting you pass by with yours.  Finally we were off and waiting at another bus stop in the middle of nowhere looking at a new set of scrubby trees as evening continued to descend.

After about 15 minutes the right bus did come and we got on and got to the ferry terminal.  We still had a few hours to kill before the ferry came. Kaitlin got her one last Wiener schnitzel in Germany as consultation for not getting her Hamburg-burger at the terminal cafeteria and we bored ourselves playing several rounds of crazy eights.  We took some pictures of the terminal’s huge alcohol store set up so that Norwegians and Swedes could quick buy it cheap before heading home.  One German told me, “To save money the Norwegians buy their alcohol from the Swedes, the Swedes go to Finland, the Finns come to Germany, and the Germans go to Poland.”

The ferry came and we got on.  At first the boat seemed like other car ferries. We walked on a metal floor along the edge of a line of parked cars to a very skinny cold metal staircase that went up to a cold metal door.  When that door was opened however we walked into a spacious room with parquet floor and detailed woodwork.  More like my image of a cruise ship than a ferry and so it continued. The 5th floor even had a very small swimming pool (?!) complete with tiny water slide and hot tub. (pic) There was also a sauna and full restaurant and bar.  Our room’s décor was sweet, if perhaps a touch too nautical, there were a great many more drawers than I could ever imagine needing for one night and the bunk beds were strapped to the wall when not in use.  We even had a shower! We set down our packs and laughed.  The ferry gave its loud barking honk of a warning call at leaving port and we slowly set off towards Sweden while we opened our Cochem bottle of wine and toasted our victory at having made it off of that bus going to Lubeck.