Remembering

We've been spending a lot of time in Steinebach reminiscing. Google Translate is way better now than it was a decade ago, so Stefan doesn't need to help translate quite as much.

http://wadlstrumpf.blogspot.com/2010/09/detours.html

http://wadlstrumpf.blogspot.com/2010/09/reminiscence-roadtrip.html

http://wadlstrumpf.blogspot.com/2013/07/der-ewige-igel.html

http://wadlstrumpf.blogspot.com/2014/06/this-mattress.html

http://wadlstrumpf.blogspot.com/2009/07/cultural-highlights-from-bavaria.html

http://wadlstrumpf.blogspot.com/2010/08/how-to-eat-semmel-at-breakfast.html

Herrsching, Hohenpeißenberg, Wessobrunn, and a REWE

E and I walked a lot this summer. One morning, we walked from Steinebach to Herrsching. Like the walk to Andechs, this walk has become regular enough for us that I didn't take many photos. Here's the most interesting one, a glimpse at how Germany is trouncing the U.S. in environmentally friendly energy.

Solar carport

In Herrsching, we did some essential shopping--breakfast and Gelatine-frei Gummibaerchen--and then hung out along the Ammersee, waiting for S and H to pick us up for our afternoon roadtrip.

The afternoon roadtrip was a compromise. H had been saying for days, "we should really hike the dramatically precipitous trail between Herzogstand and Heimgarten in the Bavarian Alps!" Then she would pause, remembering--"oh, but wait, Liz is afraid of heights. That's really too bad. I guess we can't go." She would say this at breakfast, and then again over afternoon coffee. After dinner, as we discussed plans for the next few days, she'd wax fondly about the razor-thin trail between peaks--"oh, but wait, Liz is afraid of heights. That's really too bad. I guess we can't go." Not one to hold my 95-year-old legally-blind mother-in-law back, I finally declared that YES, if H really wanted to, we would all hike together from Herzogstand to Heimgarten, me included. H was all for it, but inclement weather and insufficient time prevented us from making the trip. Whew.

Instead, we did a leisurely afternoon roadtrip. Our first stop was the pilgrimage church atop the 988 meter high "Mount Parnassus of Bavaria" in Hohenpeißenberg. S, E, and H drove up; I walked up from Peißenberg. As more proof that my camera doesn't do justice to altitude gain, here's a photo looking up up up to the church on the high hill. It looks like it's off in the distance, but it's actually up in the distance. Oh well.

OK, this photo does a better job: see that roof behind the sign, below the road? The hill was steep.

After hiking up and up, with just a little more up to go, I came across some shrooms growing on the trail through the woods.

So that pilgrims heading up to the church don't shock themselves on electric cow fences, someone tied a piece of warning tape on the wire. Underneath was the only way to go.

The view from the top. Those are the Bavarian Alps in the distance. Herzogstand and Heimgarten are in there somewhere.

There are two chapels on top of Peißenberg. The first was built in 1514 and later baroquisiert. The second was added at the beginning of the 17th century to accommodate the pilgrims coming to the first.

Obligatory organ photo. Teeny tiny organ.

After lunch on a terrace overlooking the valley, we headed down and north to Wessobrunn, a former abbey that has most recently been saved thanks to a financial collaboration with a cosmetics company that now occupies the lower floor. An upper floor hallway is open for tours, which we didn't know until we arrived 10 minutes late. We were obliviously not disappointed, but to our good fortune, a groundskeeper spied us from across the parking lot, called to us not to leave, herded us to the abbey, rang the tour guide to let her know she had latecomers, and unlocked the big front door to let us in.

Ca. 1260 Roemerturm says it's ca. 3:10 p.m. Tour started at 3:00--punctually, I'm sure.

The tour paused in a stately room to discuss the long history of the abbey. I was distracted by the dogs chasing animals on the ceiling.

After the tour, we took a quick peek inside the abbey's church.

Obligatory organ photo

A cautionary tale for nuns

On the drive home, we stopped by a REWE to pick up some groceries. It was the biggest supermarket I'd ever seen in Germany, located in a tiny town (Fischen am Ammersee) outside of a bigger town (Pähl am Ammersee, population ~2,500), so clearly a destination grocery store. Its website boasts about its size--over 15,000 articles offered in a 1,200 m² space, with an additional beverage market over 400 m². It was so shockingly big by German grocery store standards that I took a photo.

The REWE entrance--a small fraction of the store

The first time I went to Germany with S, in 1991, folks still went shopping for fruits and veggies at the fruits and veggies store (Gaertnerei Maier), and bread shopping at the bakery (Buchner), and meat shopping at the butcher's (Raabe). When S was a kid, his father also went yeast shopping at the brewery ten kilometers away in Inning, and S and his mom bought flour at the mill in Oberalting (5km), honey and eggs at Sanktjohannser's farm in Auing (1.5km), and milk and butter at the dairy in Steinebach (Eberl). They had to drive to some of these--even nearby Auing--"because they were all in other villages." Then along came the first tentative multi-purpose grocery stores in town, Spar and Das kleine Kaufhaus, and later the chain store Tengelmann, and the mom and pop shops began closing up as mom and pop aged out and their kids had no interest in carrying on the family businesses. Then along came Edeka, an even bigger grocery store on the edge of town, and Tengelmann eventually threw in the towel, long after Spar and Das kleine Kaufhaus had folded. With Edeka came the necessity of doing all of the shopping by car, which makes shopping quite difficult for elderly blind women who can't drive--but then along came the Eismann frozen-foods delivery truck. Steinebach still has a dedicated fruits and veggies store, and the best place to buy eggs is still at the Sanktjohannser farm (which now has an egg-automat out front), but the bakery, butchery, dairy, flour mill, and brewery are gone. The REWE in Fischen could swallow five Steinebach Edekas whole and still have room for more.

South Tyrol: days 0-1

In mid-June, we flew to MUC. We picked up a rental car, then drove to Steinebach for a quick lunch with H & co. at Paradieswinkel, a.k.a. Woerl. Located on the Woerthsee, it's S's favorite spot for dining al fresco.

Woerl (view from the dock)

The water was amazingly clear, making it possible to photograph fish from 15 feet away.

E and I walked from H's to Woerl and back--about 50 minutes each way through fields and along the lake.

After lunch, we said farewell and drove south to South Tyrol. South Tyrol is the northernmost province in Italy, with an affinity for Austria; the primary spoken language is German. (The other languages are Italian and Ladin.) S did all of the driving; E and I slept most of the way, waking up occasionally to munch on Johannisbeeren and radishes. We stopped in St. Lorenzen for dinner, where traffic was being redirected to accommodate a helicopter evacuation following a motorcycle-car crash. (We saw lots of motorcyclists the week that we were in South Tyrol, and heard a proportionally disconcerting number of helicopters.) After dinner, we drove the last few km to our Ferienwohnung, Gschliererhof, located on a working farm nestled on the side of the hill between St. Lorenzen and St. Vigilio.

S drove a little further up the road so we could see this preview of hikes to come.

The next day, we hiked up the hill above Gschliererhof, to see what we could see. Our 5-hour loop route took us along trails and roads to Enneberg and back.

An abandoned farm house en route. My camera did not do a great job of capturing the tree growing through the stairs.

View looking toward Fanes-Sennes-Braies National Park

I said "look cool," and he did.

Holunder--a.k.a. Elderberry

The town in the valley is St. Vigilio; the church on the hill is in Corte.

Enneberg has a pretty little baroque church (altar dates from 1636).

Obligatory organ photo

After leaving the church, we tracked down some popsicles--hard to do at 3pm in a rural town of ~2,900. Even with a year's worth of freezer burn, they were the most refreshing popsicles ever.

Another view of Corte, because the view was so magnificent.

Falling hexagons, next 3km

My camera isn't great at capturing steepness/depth, but notice the nearly vertical drop left of the road.

We bought a big chunk of Bergkaese at the bio-cheesery, thinking it would last us a few days. Silly us.

Gschliererhof. This photo, like all the others, does not do justice to the steepness of the hill.

Last day in Iceland: Reykjavik

Our Iceland adventure came to an end with an all-day drive from Húsavík back to Keflavik on Wednesday, and flying off our separate ways on Thursday morning. (In theory, anyway. In practice, my mom got to stay an extra night due to airplane engine failure.)

We stopped in Reykjavik on Wednesday evening to poke around a little and eat dinner. The weather was rainy and cold and felt more autumnal than summery. I had found a restaurant recommended by TripAdvisor and dragged everyone off the beaten touristy path through blustery streets to find it. The restaurant was booked up for the evening, and by then everyone was hungry and cranky, so we skipped even walking past the Phallus Museum, which we were quite near, and instead walked back to the main drag for bowls of hot noodle soup.

Mentioning the Phallus Museum is reminding me that I previously forgot to mention that we skipped seeing the Icelandic Museum of Sorcery and Witchcraft in Hólmavík on the day we drove to Borðeyri. That meant missing seeing a pair of "necropants"--a pair of leggings flayed from the exhumed body of a dead man. According to Wikipedia, wearing necropants brings you an unending supply of money, assuming you make the pants correctly. You must get permission from the man you're flaying before he dies, you have to flay the necropants in one piece from the waist down, and you need to steal a coin from a poor widow and put it in the scrotum along with a special symbol written on a scrap of paper. To keep yourself from going to hell for all that, you also need to find a successor to wear the pants, who will step into each leg as you step out. Seems like a lot of work.

I want to point out that I'm not suggesting phalluses have anything to do with sorcery and witchcraft--although I suppose they might, plus there's the essential scrotum part with the necropants--just that in a country where there's a lot of empty space, there's a surprising number of museums that focus on topics neglected elsewhere. Clearly they're filling a niche.

Speaking of surprises in a country with a lot of empty space, way back in the West Fjords, on the road to Dynjandi, we passed a lookout point, the main purpose of which was to mark a location pertinent to Gisli's saga. Two large plaques detailed how (1) Gisli's wife Auda hits Eyolf in the nose with a purse filled with silver as retribution for trying to bribe her to betray Gisli, and (2) how Gisli slaughters several of his enemies in the brief time between being sliced open with their spears and dying himself. For a country with so few people and an immense amount of open space, folks way back when sure spent a lot of time doing one another in. I suppose that's true across cultures.

Anyway, back to Reykjavik...

Admiring flowers across from the parliament building

Parliament

 Guess who beat England in the 2016 Eurocup to make it into the quarter finals?

Hallgrímskirkja, Lutheran church built 1945-1986

Obligatory organ photo. Orgelbau Klais (Bonn, Germany), 102 ranks, 72 stops, 5275 pipes.