Walking Through Germany
Holiday three: Franconia: eleven days of walking begun 18 September 2006
For those who don't know, the idea is to explore Germany without thinking about the two World Wars.
Tourist magazine:"Franconia has 14 holiday regions and being in the centre is the melting pot of cultures."
Encyclopaedia: "Franconia is one of the tribal duchies of mediaeval Germany, centred around the valley of the Main and including a large strip to the west of the Rhine."
And so we went back to our walk, taking the 12.30 train from Berne and another train or two until we reached Rohrsach and took the last boat of the season for the hour's journey across Bodensee to Lindau, with its stone lion on a plinth guarding the harbour and the hotel where we'd booked. We could sit outside on deck it was so warm although there were dark rain clouds all around and heavy showers except for one hole where the sun's rays shone through dramatically.
I asked the matelot what he would do in the winter and he said he would work in a hospital while some of the other crew would work on the boat maintenance and there was the occasional lunch cruise for them to do.
A chart near the water in Rohrschach showed the level had risen in the last 24 hours - a centimetre, I think. We had had heavy rainfall - but it's a big lake or you could say enormous puddle. The level looked about normal but earlier in the heat wave the boats had almost had to stop because of the low water level.
Lindau is a peninsula of cobbled streets, no cars, many angels' trumpets in pots and other flowers and the first of a string of charming little places (which Germany is so good at) we had visited or would visit. Round the harbour along the railings is a series of pictures depicting Lindau in the old days etc. They are at chest level and in full view of all passers-by - of whom there were very many when we were there - so they have not yet scratched or otherwise vandalised.
We had supper outside in a pizzeria where the waiter was sorely stressed by two Chinese who insisted on sitting at a table not belonging to the café and irritated the Italian -speaking waiter by asking for things a simple pizzeria didn't have: freshly squeezed orange juice, a toasted sandwich.... We think they were reading down the list of food in a guide book. Then they settled down, ignored the view of the pretty square and passers-by and looked at all the photos they had taken with their digital camera. I craned unobtrusively to see what they were but could not see them.
Our breakfast buffet had a notice, Bitte nichts mitnehemen. Probably hotel had a clientèle of cyclists and people like me.
We had a day's pass for Bavaria - 25 euros between us - there could have been five of us. You can't use the high speed trains such as ICE or start before 9..
Went on 5 little trains via Kempton, Augsburg, through an empty landscape (especially compared with CH) of pastures and woods. The last train was a shuttle to Rothenburg. Arrived 4.15 where all the notices were in Japanese. We knew from our hotel list that there were any number of hotels and booked for 3 nights into the second hotel we tried just before the town gates - the first was full. We paid in advance because madame, who turned out to be friendly, was convinced that people like us without a car would sneak off to the station early one morning without paying - it had happened, she said..
We booked in for 3 nights because we were still two (for us) days' walk south of Rothenburg and we hoped with the buses we could go south from Rothenburg each day and do another bit. The trouble being we are just in Bavaria but really on the Bavarian-Baden Württemberg border and public transport for each area does not always synchronize. "The Bavarians think they are special," sniffed one man from Baden-Württemberg.
A study of the bus timetables near the station showed there was indeed just the one bus that suited us and it was at 5.30 that evening going south to Bettenfeld at the head of the little Schandtauber Valley. We could go there and walk back to Rothenburg and thus tick that bit off - we are very honourable and do not miss out anything.... It was a late start but only eight kms so we should get back before dark. Exploring the little walled Rothenburg, our longed for destination, could wait a couple of hours.
It was a cosy little valley and included info boards explaining the fish in the river and the general flora and fauna. The last bit was the long climb back up to Rothenburg which is set on a hill. We arrived at the South Gate, gate at the far end from our hotel, and so finally got to walk, in the twilight, through the middle of Rothenburg - about one km back to our gate and hotel.
It had two pages of accommodation in our computer handout, its own little shuttle train line and no wonder. What a place! Old houses, Japanese, cobbled squares, Americans, quaint signs, tourist shops, Americans, Japanese, churches, the Town Hall, Americans, ??- they had probably popped over from the October Beer Festival in Munich which was not that far away. There were 6 and a half million visitors for the Fest, the papers said proudly later. I wonder if they counted correctly for that is the same as the legal and illegal population of CH.
By sheer chance we spotted the Red Hen, a genteel looking hotel (not on our list which is for walkers) where Aunt Eileen and co had stayed just before the war when everyone was saying Heil Hitler and she said they imitated them. There were any number of Zimmer frei signs too.
Hector had left his useful little paper with bus times taken from the Internet at home....but he could remember quite a lot and we took bus, train, bus south west beyond where we had gone to yesterday back to Wallhausen where we had left off last holiday. Sergei, our last bus driver (the name was up on a board), had a beautiful mop of curls but had not been anywhere near a charm school. We were the only ones on that bus - there were never many passengers on any of them.
Walked across the usual rolling landscape of pastures and woods and past garden full of dahlias, chrysanthemums, angels' trumpets, past laden apple trees (one had fallen over it was so heavy with fruit) , plum and pear trees. We feasted - but not on pears as they are rotten and full of wasps by the time they fall. There were all manner of bushes bowed down with berries, often the unmistakeable spindle berries....and often, near those long low buildings, was the smell of intensively farmed pigs, poor things.
We got to Bettenfeld soon after 4 and our bus, the one we had taken out from Rothenburg the day before, was due at 5.40. There was a funny old hostelry (Fremdenzimmer - but our things were in Rothenburg) where we sat in the sun and had a drink and then killed the rest of the time visiting the church on a little hill.
And no bus came....which did not seem to surprise the elderly couple who kept the pub and their elderly friend. They rang for a taxi for us (no mobile signal) and while we waited, had a desultory conversation in the twilight of the old pub about what we were doing and the trip by car one of them had made round Lake Constance. No one else was there although they did have walkers or cyclists who stayed the night, they said, and why didn't we fetch our things.
Supper inside in a little restaurant in Rothenburg - nearly every menu has a section, "Frankish food" or "What local people eat". It is mostly fried pork - those poor pigs. Often too there are Knödeln (dumplings) which in a spirit of open-mindedness I tried. Their texture made me think they were made of tapioca - sorry Franconia, but I have no intention of learning to love them any more than I learnt to love Swedes in Scotland.
Question: Why are all the windows in the Stube in a pub/restaurant always frosted over so you can't see outside? I would make a new law against it.
Took bus north to Tauberzell (not till 11.30 as it was a school bus taking children home - no other buses except in the early morning) and walked south (into the sun) back to Rothenburg. We could not do it other way as there would have been no suitable bus back. Good thing Hector checked the timetable on the computer in the tourist office when we wandered round the town in the morning before the bus went, otherwise we'd still be sitting despairingly on a bench in Tauberzell and you wouldn't be reading this.
From the bus going north you get a fleeting glimpse of Rothenburg set on its hill - a wonderful romantic silhouette of towers and steep houses, perhaps a bit like the New Jerusalem, - set on hill....
It was a peaceful walk. We first sat on a bench and ate the local delicacy we'd bought that morning, a snowball the size of a tennis ball made of strands of pastry and deep fried - we found it a bit dry. Went past a huge Celtic settlement, so the map said, out of sight above us. (We crossed the Roman Limes (Wall) on the previous holiday so there are no Roman remains).
Below Rothenburg we directed some bewildered tourists to the village church with a mandatory altar to see (we didn't bother), let some lost cyclists study our map and then the steep (hot) climb up to the town, a welcome cuppa in the court yard of the Red Hen and supper later under the chestnut trees at the hotel next to ours. Interesting that lots of hotels have the Belegt (full) sign.
We had to get that same late morning bus again - just us again and three little things dropped off at various places for their lunch. So beforehand again we idled our time away pleasantly amid the quaintness of Rothenburg - what better thing was there to do. Today alas, having looked forward to visiting it for so long, we would have to finally shake its dust off our feet and look towards the next big place, Würzburg (which is where this particular footpath, the HW4, ends).
We climbed up on the wall and walked round a bit of that - evidently we were on the bit that got bombed because there were lots of plaques commemorating people who had given money to rebuild it - from Germany, Japan, China.... The wall is high so you get a good view of the steep red roofs in the town.
I opted out of visiting the Reichstadt Museum (I might have gone there if the weather hadn't been so nice) at the far end of the town and while Hector explored a few more cobbled streets, I indulged my favourite hobby - sitting at a table outside, watching everyone, eavesdropping on American tourists (they are always so enthusiastic although one, an elderly man, at the next table refused to buy a coffee - "I've just had breakfast" and refused to take his feet off another chair - "My legs hurt". I also picked up howlers in the English translation of the German menu: two good ones: Rump steak (I hadn't realised that was German) became bottom steak and cabagge salad was on offer, later corrected to cabage salad (and somehow sounding quite different from cabbage salad).
So at 11.20 out through the North Gate and back to the bus at the station.
After crossing a bridge, the bridge, the path from Tauberzell went up through trees away from the river - it seemed a long way up but that was because it was hot. But out on the plateau a wind blew sweetly.
It was hard to believe in that flattish landscape that the deep Tauber valley wound along behind us. We had a prolonged pause and late picnic at a shady picnic table in a wood, then startled some deer as we went on down to Munster in another wooded valley.
The latter part of the day was along the little Munster valley - the map shows we are in an area of several pretty attractive little river valleys. The rivers wriggle quite a bit which I suppose means an underlying instablility in the earth. We went past Herrgott Church, built on the site where a farmer in 1384 found a holy wafer (a host or Hostie) and so a pilgrim church was prudently founded . Then on past a thimble museum and still down in the valley past a row of houses heralding the beginning of Creglingen and all with pretty flower-filled gardens, tomato plants dripping with tomatoes, rows of leeks and lettuces and sometimes a hop plant draped over a hedge or Virginia creeper growing over a still green tree so that the whole thing looked like a new exotic plant. "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness...."
There were several places to overnight according to our computer list. Hector's GPS led us to one that seemed the right price (50 -60 Euros B and B for two) at the near end of the village - a bright little guest house-cum-restaurant (there is no equivalent in England) with a big outside terrace. It was just above the town with fab views from our bedroom window over the town to the church and a collection of typical steep-roofed, red-tiled, wood-beamed (would we call them "Tudor"?) buildings.
It was good to get there and have a shower as the weather is hot, especially when down in a narrow airless and sometimes sunny valley with few trees. On the plus side, there are no worries about rain and our things getting wet. It is late September, so the shadows are long even at midday and the sun has lost its bite; the evenings and mornings are pleasantly cool. We started off with half a litre of water each but later had to up it to a litre each because you can't rely on finding a tap somewhere. There are lots of fountains but there is often that annoying notice over the welcoming-looking, gushing water: Kein Trinkwasser.
We explored the village, called "historic" (and nice enough but we are getting a bit blasé and our standards are high) by a tourist handout, and had Apfelstrudel and tea at a pavement café. Dined (inside) back at guesthouse restaurant and as mine host made signs of wanting an early night, we had one too. Went to sleep with the buildings opposite dramatically floodlit - they seemed to be bang opposite our window as if it was our personal show.
N.B. There are several places around here whose names are vaguely familiar because the local rulers are associated with English history because they were protestant and therefore English princes or pincesses could marry into the family ?
1530 wurde Brandenburg-Ansbach protestantisch.
Caroline of Ansbach is a name I remember but who she?
(Saxe-)Coburg - Albert's family.
Darmstadt - Hesse (Alexandra, last Tzarina of Russia and Victoria's granddaughter.)
Teck (near Stuttgart) Princess May of Teck.
Anhalt
Where is Battenberg??? Cf Prince Philip.
Under Napoleon the 289 states and free cities of Germany were reduced to 112 larger "states" - but that is still quite a lot.
There are several paths marked on the maps (we walk through one in about 4 days) with symbols - a shell for St Jacob's Way (which mostly did not go where we wanted to go), a rucksack, a walking boot.... We were on the HW4 but the Vineyard Way, marked with a bunch of grapes, would take us on a more direct route for the first part of the day. Its first part along a grassy path halfway up the hillside and parallel with the valley was a Lehrpfad or learning path. The way went between huge piles of stones once cleared from the fields and meticulous terracing of the steep hillside, though there is nothing growing except grass now. The info boards told us about the people who had worked there, the crops, animals and birds.... "The grass is mown once a year to keep things as they are but otherwise there are no longer any vineyards or potato patches or sheep pastures." "The field workers preferred potatoes form a shelf in a shop to cultivating them on a steep hillside" - especially when sudden bad weather might well spoil the harvest.
The landscape was pretty flat at the top but I was amused to see the slightest swell ( which you usually needed the eye of faith to see and the contour lines were rather far apart) was called a Höhe (height) on the map and had a name - some with meanings that we could work out. For example, there was Brandhöhe - fire hill ( perhaps it had a beacon there before mobile phones were invented). Others had what seemed to be people's names: Sulzhofer Höhe, Schweinfurter Höhe....
We walked down through the pretty little village of Schirmbach and found a sign for the HW4, as the map said we would, at the village of Niedersteinbach in the next valley. We found nowhere to replenish out bottles and at that stage we were still only carrying half a litre of water each - so we had to plod on.
We walked up the other side of the valley past a huge castle we had seen from afar. It had a courtyard and a car park outside its walls but seemed to be a no-go area, for the gate could be opened but a notice said, "Beware of the dog." So we just peered through at the courtyard - no dog and little to see - and went on across another plateau and as often happened, a group of wind turbines were going round slowly in the distance. I find them elegant rather than obtrusive - but if they are erected on cultivated land with a track already there they don't make the impact they and their infrastructure makes on wild land. Picnicked and rested in a wood on Owl Hill.
Still in woods, ( where because of the breeze the temperature was just perfect,) we were back on the wavy border with Baden Württemberg.
Sebastian phoned from Geneva to see if we had been anywhere near the accident to the super fast hanging railway so I sank down on one of the stones marking the border for a chat....- and there with the little wind and the sun dappling down it was a most pleasant interlude.
The water problem was solved when we came to a big permanent scout camp on Keltenschanze (the hill of the Celts) with permanent wash blocks and TAPS. But by then we were nearly there.
A little more forest and then we walked down into Aub's sundrenched gorgeous (sorry to use the word gorgeous or its synonym yet again) little cobbled main square with pavement cafes and huge shining gold statue of Mary - and two charming steep-roofed, geranium-decorated traditional hotels side by side. Our feet took us to the Golden Lamb rather than the White Horse. It was very old with lovely old stairs and a bedroom with an uneven, creaky wooden floor and lots of exposed wooden beams.
Mine Host took a photo of us both and later after a shower we did the walk he recommended, past an immaculate Jewish Graveyard (some graves were of soldiers of WW!) with gravestones with gold lettering in Hebrew, ("This graveyard belongs to the community. Please look after it," said a notice on the gate.)
Then on along a little sluggish river, past the old town walls, the Spital where the poor were looked after (The philosophy was "bed and altar") , the elegant church and back to the square and a cup of tea outside the bakery. Ate supper outside at the Golden Lamb.
It was a day's march almost due north - no twists and turns so that we got different views -across tableland and a prairie landscape of maize, sugar beet and alfalfa and almost no shady forest.
We went through Gülchsheim and came to Hopferstadt, a square shaped village full of statues of Mary. We sat on a bench to rest, walked on for an hour or so, stopped to picnic in the one wood of the day - N.B. a very little one - and after hunting despairingly around everywhere, came to the conclusion Hector had left his beloved GPS behind on the bench in Hopferstadt....And how we missed it for, provided it was in contact with a satellite or two and the battery hadn't run down etc, it told us how many meters to our next hotel and how to get there, what our average speed was....Hector's name was on the outside on a sticker and on the display. We could only hope that a village with so many statues of Mary would produce lots of honest people.
(This story has a happy ending for it was waiting for us when we go home.)
We went slowly down into Ochsenfurt which is beside the River Main, the river which would now dominate the maps and our walk for the next few days. It's 307 miles long, rises near Bohemia not that far to the east and flows into the Rhine at Mainz, not much more than 100 kms west of Würzburg as the crow flies. It makes a huge letter W which is why it is so long.) Hector found our intended hotel - not that we had booked, we never did - without the GPS. It was full.
So was the next one and the third which was the last. But it was a Saturday evening and lovely weather .... Ochsenfurt did have a station back up at the back of the town and we could have taken a train to somewhere bigger. But the angelic owner at the third hotel phoned round and after 5 tries, found us a room, the last one, in a hotel in a village 2 kms down the road along beside the River Main, which would be our placid companion for the next few days.
I was very tired by the time we got to our bedroom but the usual shower was most reviving. The village we had plodded the extra two kms to was picturesque with old gates and towers and no doubt a Town Hall somewhere.
The hotel was beside the river and we went out and sat at the water's edge in the sunshine until supper, which we had in the hotel Biergarten.
Across the Garten a man had a collection of 8 older ladies with him - they were on a coach tour and presumably one reason why we only got the last room. He the bus driver and tour guide and while he sat with them he never seemed to stop talking with a voice that cut through all other noises. I wonder what his ladies thought of him, but they seemed a happy little group.
It was a Sunday so there were cyclists of all ages beside the gently-flowing river, part of the waterway going from the North Sea to the Black Sea and sometimes even on a Sunday the odd enormous boat went quietly past, preferable to the noisy little pleasure boats. The hillside on our right, facing west, was covered in vineyards, the other side was forested. But it was above a busy road and railway line so that however peaceful it all was in a way, we were never out of range of the noise of traffic when we were beside the Main. Comment not criticism.
We passed a Triedler Station, now a popular café and hotel, where they had kept relays of horses to help pull the boats upstream,
We took our time and finally reached Eibelstadt ( a village) and got one of the three rooms (the list said it only had 3 rooms) in the Mühle Hotel which we knew was in a nice place near the river. Our room indeed looked out onto the river.
Had a cup of tea on its terrace near the river and then went to explore the village. Like so many, it had once been a little walled town too and various towers were still standing. I presume these old walls and towers go back to the Middle Ages and have nothing to do with Napoleon's cleansing. But presumably the reason why so many places have an impressive town hall, an impressive church and maybe what was once a monastery or a "castle-cum-stately home" is because before Napoleon's rationalizations they were once independent places ruled by a Prince-Bishop or some petty ruling family such as the Tecks.
Now there is an interesting little story. The title "Teck" (a place near Stuttgart) was almost the most meaningless of them all, for having died out, it was resurrected to give a younger Württemberg son a meaningful title so he could marry within his class and he did indeed marry the English George III's granddaughter, Mary. Mary's cousin, Queen Victoria later granted him the title His Highness. To continue the story, despite his title he had no income and had to live off his wife's income granted by the London Parliament. Their daughter, Princess May of Teck, married George IV. I wonder if she knew where Teck was. The title died out again because there was a lack of sons.
Outside the church was a monument to the 1870 war (A nasty little one between Bismarck and the French, won by Bismarck) and for such a small place and so far away from the main scene of action (Alsace) so many "fallen heroes", as they were called here.
There was a village party in the still-sunny main square, complete with a band, benches and tables for drinks, lots of people and a handicraft market in the basement of the Town Hall - paintings, patchwork, photographs made into cards, 3 D cards, paintings on barrel tops. Would have liked one of the latter but it would have been a bit heavy to carry, I suppose. Someone urged us to sit and have a coffee but we wandered on - I think the glorious weather makes everyone so relaxed and welcoming.
The town gate nearest the river had various marks to show various horrifically bad flooding of the Main that now looked so demure - some of the marks were more than 12 feet above us.
Ate outside on the terrace at the hotel and lingered. Like so many places, the bedside lamps here were no good for reading.. I am reading, (alternately with Buddenbrooks by Thos Mann) Pilgrim's Progress but it does ramble.
We breakfasted on the landing with another couple who had arrived later from Cologne. He had worked for the British Army and was no admirer of their funny little ways, especially the funny little ways of the officers. The very chatty owner of the hotel said we were in for another cloud-free day - not strictly true, as it turned out but nice of her to say so.
We set off again beside the Main and this being a working day quite a lot of huge boats went past, one with a Romanian flag, for the Main flows into the Danube and it flows through Romania into the Black Sea. There was a series of notice boards telling us about the fish in the river and saying the Main is perhaps the river with the most fish in Germany. Somewhere we passed a stone saying 1672.... (Why 1672???)
The vineyards stopped, we went past a market garden and then ahead we saw the spires of a monastery peeping from the trees on the other side of the river and then, lower down, the spire of a church. Then also on that other side of the river a huge fortress or castle came into view. We were almost in Würzburg - and here too marks on the wall, some unbelievably high, showed where the flood had sometimes got to. But the main part of the town, on our side, rises up quite steeply from the Main so presumably was not too flooded.
We walked on past where boats were moored and climbed up onto a stone foot bridge - lined with Bishops - statues of, that is. We climbed up on the bridge and we were at the end of the HW4 and finally in the place we'd been heading for since we started on the Bodensee - Würzburg Long Distance Trail (HW4). And the remarkable thing is that though we went at times of the year used by holiday makers (autumn, spring), WE NEVER SAW ANY OTHER WALKERS going in either direction.
Another wonderful town centre, cobbled, churches, Town Hall, pavement cafes (these latter always make a place look so very gemütlich.... It lacked the many Japanese tourists and the only Americans seemed to be Mormons.
We consulted our accommodation list and headed for the back of town and a hotel on a fourth floor of a large building away from the old town and near the station and so different - but perfectly OK - from the last two. It had a friendly owner and fulfilled two of my three criteria that every hotel should have for walkers like me - no steps to climb (it occupied a fourth floor and a lift took you there) and no piped music anywhere. What would get it a third star in my Travel Guide is hot milk with the breakfast coffee - but this is Germany, dream on....
We had almost come to the north end of our latest map and needed to work out the next part of our journey to Fulda, (I'm sure another delightful place) three or fours days' walk to the other side of a Nature Park (of which Germany has many. We headed for a map and guide book shop, then for a pavement café to study them and as we were not far from the Mormons, we could watch them earning their Brownie points. We studied the maps -of which altogether we now had a goodly selection!
There was a supermarket opposite the hotel, it began to pour, so for that night (and the next) we got in food and ate and watched TV. (Talking about Romania and Bulgaria joining Common Market - very boring)
(We are heading for Fulda via Karlstadt, Gemünden, Grafendorf, Burgsinn, Obersinn, Altgrunen, Sterbfriss, Flieden and Neuhof. May have written some of these wrongly as I can't read my handwriting.)
We woke as the forecast said we would to heavy rain. We hung around hoping it would lighten; it didn't but it couldn't get worse and "rain before 7 fine before 11". But the raindrops bounced ever harder as we plodded on and it didn't stop at 11. But by then we were too far to go back.
We walked along the west bank of the Main, trying to dodge the puddles the size of lakes. On the other side was the busy railway and huge industrial hinterland.
When we got to Margetshöchheim, where we might have got a bus back, the rain sort of eased off and there just as we needed it was a bakery and tables and chairs and tables inside as well as out. As well as cakes it served bowls of milky coffee which were the highlight of our whole trip (perhaps) - I can still feel that warm bowl between my clammy hands....
The rain stayed away more or less so we might as well go a bit further There was a picturesque footbridge to the other side of the river and we crossed and climbed up amid vineyards that stretched into the distance up the hillside above us. There were lovely wooded hills on the other side - we knew they were there because of the contour lines on the map (which we'd studied the previous evening but we did not open in that rain). But it was all so misty and after 90 minutes (when we weren't that far from the station) the rain began again.
The way went between vineyards with notices telling us about the grapes and finally when we were almost there, there was an enormous old winepress under a roof where we could have a rest out of the rain, look at the map and read the notice explaining it and the history of what was a historic wine village.
At the station we found a train almost at once back to Würzburg and our hotel nearby, where, knowing there was a good train service and we could go back to where we'd finished the next day, we had booked in for 2 nights.
We had got wetter than we realized - even the Euro notes needed drying on the radiator.
We climbed 500 feet up from the station and the village of Thüngersheim (town gates, church, etc etc etc) into the vineyards. There would have been lovely views across the river to the hills but it was autumn and there had been much heavy rain, so the day began with much mist. But the varied and delicious smells of autumn almost made up for that lack.
Our path is marked on the map but there were almost no markings where we walked so that Hector had to study the map. He navigated most beautifully and it was a lovely high-level walk, partly along a cliff edge, through the vines.
The main road below roared incessantly, the train line roared quite often and the boats on the river (each could carry what 100 lorries could carry) were quite silent - which tells you something..
The path took us back down to the river and, instead of crossing the river at Himmelstadt as we found our new map told us to (it overlapped a bit with the one we had with us but we'd left it at the hotel) we carried on... and came finally to a full stop where the main road and railway could barely squeeze between the river and the cliffs, there was certainly no room for fields or a footpath and it was all very dramatic. What to do? Go all the way back to the last place? We preferred to go back just a little way, find a way under the railway and walk along the road for 40 minutes beside lots of discarded MacDonald's containers, all MacDonalds managers please note what car-born passengers do. It could have been worse and 40 minutes later we were into the industrial quarter of Karlstadt and could see the golden arches of MacDonalds further on. (Is there an apostrophe?)
H wondered if there would be any hotels in such a wasteland. I'd already seen a sign to one, I said. A sign soon directed us to the old town and a list of FIVE car parks....which was the clue....There was a quaint, long, traffic-free, café-lined main street and other charming little streets, sensible shops and no tourists that we could see. Karlstadt should be on the World Heritage List. What a gem.
Two hotels seemed to be still asleep - it was mid afternoon - but we got the last room at a posh old-fashioned looking one at the old town gate (a "roof" room with lots of exposed beams and a LIFT to it).
All the local jackdaws were perched on the town gate outside our room having a chat,- what I call a cluck and what our bird book calls a "metallic jack". We got the town trail from the nearby Tourist Office -so they must get visitors.
After supper inside, walked to the river, sat under the stars and admired the flood-lit ruin on the other side of the river, slept well and awoke to more chatting by the jackdaws.
The new map said we were following the Karolingian Way ( a K on a pink orb on a white spot) Climbed up from Karlstadt past huge gravel quarries and onto not a forest but moorland - the first we'd encountered in Germany. Being autumn and not that late in the morning, it was again so misty - so no views except down 1000 feet to the misty river. It was a classic walk for several kilometers along a cliff edge, past a viewpoint and board explaining the geology, through moorland.- by far the most dramatic walk since Bodensee. Quite a lot of people were doing it, including a school class, even on that misty morning.
At the end we went down a steep path through woods and then down some steps to Gambach. Rather than walking along beside the river as it did a meander - walking always beside a river can get boring, we climbed up again, though it was not that big a climb, sat on a bench and picnicked and cut across the meander along tracks through farmland and forest.
The last 4 kms were back beside the river and guess what, when we got to a dear little Joe's Caff serving beer (of course), tea etc, I noticed I had left (AGAIN) my bumbag (or fannypack as Cousin Pam from Minnesota calls it), on a bench when I took a photo. Well, it is designed not to be noticed when you are wearing it....
I asked the owner of the dive if he had a bike I could borrow - we were on a cycle path and the bench was only two kms back. (We could even see the bag in the photo I took - and in fact it had fallen off the back of the bench.) He didn't but he asked an elderly knight in shining armour (a friend?) who cycled by later and he went and fetched it, bless him, and would not accept a drink.
Gemünden , (of course,) also has gates (and an old steam engine near its centre) and a pretty cobbled main square. The main road and the railway run between it and the river, though, so it has to lose a few brownie points AND, as we found out later, you have to plod all of 20 mins to reach the so-called local station.
We had what they sometimes call "Vesper" (evening meal) in the square and then had a stroll round to see the sights - there was no official Trail but several info boards. There was the place where housewives had dried their washing (not seen that before), the old town gate, a wonderfully elaborate fountain, the church and on a hill high above some intriguing looking ruins where presumably the ruling family or prince bishop had lived.
We are coming into the Spessart (Rhön Section) Nature Park but that will have to wait for next time.
Next day we walked the long way to the station and, with a freedom of Bavaria ticket, went home east via Bamberg, a UNESCO World Heritage City (didn't live up to the other places we'd seen or perhaps we were satiated) and north to Coburg (cf Albert as in Victoria and?) .
