Wadlstrumpf: Basel to Staufen Day 3 - Britzingen to Bad Krozingen

Thursday June 5, Britzingen to Staufen and beyond

S was done with his conference, and we were supposed to meet on an ICE train in Freiburg at 12:55pm. Given the choice between (1) walking to Staufen, re-visiting my second most favorite ruins in all of Baden-Wuerttemberg, and then catching a train to Bad Krozingen and another train to Freiburg, and (2) walking to Staufen and then walking another 3.5 miles to Bad Krozingen, I chose to violate Rule of Hiking #4 ("When ruins beckon, oblige"). I was, in fact, so determined to make this work, that I arrived at the Bad Krozingen train station with 45 minutes to spare and caught an earlier train to Freiburg.

Tiny town Muggardt, pop. 70

The vineyards are, of course, evidence that this is wine country, as is the broom in the photo below. The broom indicates that a Strausswirtschaft is open--a seasonal pub where the resident vintner serves wine and food. The broom is a "vintner's bush," a symbol for good eats & drinks that's been in use possibly since Roman times.

I passed a concrete...thing...

and some dancers above Ballrechten-Dottingen...

...rounded a curve on the Zaehringer Wanderweg...

...where I figured out what to do with old hiking boots.

Eventually I arrived in Staufen, where I cut through the Altstadt in order to connect my sectional hikes...

...waved to the ruins from below...

...and followed the Neumagen--one of Germany's many straightened rivers--

...into Bad Krozingen, where I hopped onto an 11:05am train to the Freiburg Hauptbahnhof.

This gave me a good 1.5 hours to hang out in Freiburg before meeting up with S and heading home to Steinebach. First I stopped by the farmers' market... no wait, first I swung by our favorite place to get passion fruit sorbetto...

...and then I swung by the farmers' market around the Muenster to buy some cherries, having resisted so many tempting cherry trees over the past few days.

Just about then, S phoned to let me know his train was running late. We knew train traffic had been complicated by the recent flooding: some of the train bridges over the Danube had been unsafe for train crossings over the past several days, and Deutsche Bahn had been asking passengers to avoid or postpone travel into Bayern if possible, but when we had checked that morning, we hadn't seen any indications of delays or cancellations.

It turned out that trains in western Germany are perfectly capable of running late all by themselves, thanks to a mix of electrical problems, track problems, other-trains-delayed problems, sick conductor problems, and so on. This is how we ended up travelling from Freiburg past our intended stop (Karlsruhe) to Mannheim instead, hoping to catch a connecting train to Munich. We chose the first train on which we could reserve seats, which gave us 90 minutes to wander around Mannheim.

Carly in front of the Mannheim Hbf

In 2006, Mannheim erected a sign to Gurs in front of the Hbf. Like the sign in Freiburg, this is a memorial/confession. On Oct. 22, 1940, some 6,500 Jews in southwestern Germany, including 2,000 from Mannheim, were deported to Gurs, a concentration camp in southwestern France. Those who survived were eventually sent to Auschwitz.

We took a quick walk through town, then waited...and waited...and waited for our repeatedly delayed train. On the bright side, unlike the two trains that were supposed to leave for Munich before ours, the train was only delayed and not outright cancelled.

Yay! We got on the train! It was raining in Bayern, but at least there were rainbows...

Home at last, but as can happen when a house is used as an AirBnB for 10 months of the year, things get rearranged a bit. Something was not quite right...