Walk to Breisach

I interrupt the Bayern hike photo dump yet again to blog about walking just short of France the other day for the sole purpose of being able to say (eventually) that I walked all the way across southern Germany.

Why not cross the border, when I was so close? Because I've done it before, and it wasn't exactly scenic. But my route from Freiburg to Breisach had varied and appealing scenery to offer.

I started from our home-away-from-home-away-from-home in the Vauban neighborhood of Freiburg:

Trash cans! I photographed this to note that in Germany, trash is separated into paper/cardboard, lightweight packaging (plastic wrappers, composite materials, aluminum foil, etc.), residual waste, and COMPOST. People compost here--and not just people with space in their backyards. Glass and plastic bottles usually have a cash deposit, so people return them to stores for recycling.

Have I already mentioned that Germans take water management seriously? Why yes, yes I have.

Komoot had a really really hard time pronouncing Zum Tiergehege Strasse (roughly, tzoom teer-geh-hay-geh shtrahsseh) as though it were English, so it said "zumm teersh strass" and then gave up.

Bicyclists for scale. These were tall trees. 

The dandelions were tall too. Several were over two feet tall. 

Wood art by sculpture artist Thomas Rees, near Waltershofen. I happened upon a trail near our apartment yesterday with a whole slew of his work, and will include photos of those in a later post.  

Exiting the woods, I learned that flowers are the smile of the Earth:

I stopped in Waltershofen to tank up: strawberry cake and a pumpkin-seed roll. I forgot that rolls in Baden-Wuerttemberg are called Broetchen rather than the Bavarian word Semmel, but the proprietor politely clarified by asking if I wanted the pretzel shape or one of these here **>>Broetchen<<**.

I ate it before I thought to photograph it.

From Waltershofen, I hiked over the Tuniberg, through terraced vineyards... 

The first trail sign I saw for Breisach...

According to tourist signage, archeological evidence dates viticulture on the Tuniberg at least as far back as Merovingian and Carolingian times (6th-9th c. CE), likely introduced by Romans expanding the empire north of the Alps.

The first view of Breisach--that hazy hill on the horizon in the center of the photo below. This was actually the only view until I was in Breisach itself, since trees and hills are hard to see over...

Past Merdingen, I passed this prepped farm field. As a kid from central Illinois, fresh from watching field prep in Bayern, I was struck by how light and sandy the soil is here.

Outside of Ihringen, I thought I must be passing a farm where pigs were being abused, but it turned out to just be a ditch full of horny frogs:

I was facing west for most of my hike. When I eventually turned around to look east, I understood why rain was in the forecast.

Bayern is beer country; Baden-Wuerttemberg is wine country:

In Breisach:

Before heading up to the Muenster, I spent some time outside of the old city walls looking for some Jewish history. This city website has a helpful historical summary. Much more detailed information can be found on the Blaues Haus website; the house itself was closed on the day I was there. 

A Stolperstein made of stone rather than bronze. Michael Eisemann was the last cantor in Breisach. Breisach had a long and heated debate about whether to allow Stolpersteine; the city eventually signed off on the project, but I wonder if the Blaues Haus community got tired of waiting and installed this one on their own.

Walking up the hill to the Muenster, I passed these mementos of death--artillery from wars dating back to the 1600s. Being on a hill above the Rhein makes a town a great target when empires fight.

The St. Stephen Muenster plaza...

Europa greift nach den Sternen by Helmut Lutz

Death working hard at war:

France is on the other side of the Rhein:

Breisach's Hexenturm was destroyed in 1675, but here's a lovely model of the tower where women accused of witchcraft were imprisoned, tried, tortured, and often executed. (Does it bother anyone else that many websites say "suspected of" rather than "accused of," as though some of the accused were actually witches?)

In Breisach, I hopped on a train back to Freiburg, then walked home. This fearsome dragon is hanging out on the St. Georgen bridge over the Dreisam river.

Things I'm going to miss

In no particular order:

1. Gun control. I have yet to see a newspaper headline about someone being shot in Baden-Wuerttemberg. On the website where I check my hometown news, three of today's regional headlines are about people being shot: a seven-year-old hit by a stray bullet at an ice-skating rink in Charlotte, a Goldsboro teenager hit by a stray bullet while hunting with his father, a Sanford man murdered in his apartment. Germans tend to use knives to kill one another. When people fight with their rivals and wave weapons around to look intimidating, they're less likely to accidentally stab a skating seven-year-old in the knee than they are to accidentally shoot her.

2. Walkability. 90% of what we need here can be reached by foot.

3. A philosophy that discourages befouling one's environment. Germans recycle pretty much everything. The government offers incentives for reducing carbon footprints, from providing affordable mass transit to building extensive networks of bicycle paths. Solar panels abound on rooftops.

4. The idea that it is worth sacrificing excess consumption for improved quality of life. The grocery store on the corner is small, but it has pretty much everything we need, it's innocuous, and we can walk there.

5. Abundant farmers' markets that emphasize fresh local and regional produce. At the St. Urban farmers' market in particular: the ravioli guy, and the produce lady who always has a pear or apple or clementine for Elias, whether he's shopping with me that day or not.

6. Having an elementary school in the backyard.

7. Elias's third grade teacher, who is mature, laid back, practical, and enthusiastic, with sensible priorities.

8. A school system that gives teachers flexibility with classroom curricula, that maintains high enough standards for certification that no one thinks twice about trusting teachers with said curricula, and that doesn't mandate day after day of in-class, multiple-choice testing as a way to answer the question, "is our children learning?"

9. Trail-covered mountains five blocks east of the front door, and the option to walk or bike from any town in Germany to any other town entirely on designated pedestrian and bike trails.

10. The idea that all of society benefits when its members are well educated and in good health, backed up with a general willingness for tax dollars to go toward services that serve people other than oneself.

11. Alemannisch, Bairisch, and Schwyzerduetsch.

12. Rot Spaetburgunder, trocken.

Fortunes

We've been quite busy for the past few days. Rodi and Renate departed Wednesday morning; that same evening, my parents returned from their trip to Italy. This afternoon, Stefan's mother arrived from Munich.

Because my parents and Helen see each other rarely, we celebrated this evening by having dinner at a Tapas/wine bar in the Altstadt. The food was tasty and the waiter quite charmingly entertaining, but the highlight of the evening was the discovery of a Biorhythm scale in the basement next to the WCs. That fortunes could be printed out either "in English" or "in Deutsch" should have been the first hint that the prognostication service, like so many other services these days, was being farmed out to a crew of southeast Asian telephone operators rather than being handled locally. Adding to the entertainment value, the machine was not properly grounded; touching it and the staircase railing simultaneously generated a painful zap. We mentioned this to the waiter, who shrugged and said, "yes, of course."

Elias's lucky numbers for the day were an asterisk. Emotionally, he will feel happy and open-minded for 11 more days; mentally, he has to be "more concentrated" (like frozen orange juice, perhaps) for 9 more days. Stefan has very lucky numbers and is of a sunny and balanced disposition, but he needs to eat more protein. As for me, I'm 19 pounds underweight, but should mix my drinks with simple mineral water because it has no calories. For better or for worse, I will be mentally quick and sharp for two more days.

Schneeburg

When your child is done with school for the day at 12:10, he not only has enough time to do his homework, but also to begrudgingly accompany his mother on what was supposed to be a reasonably short hike. Thanks to remarkably poor signage (as the pocket Badische Zeitung hiking guide explains, many of the trail signs were stolen shortly after the trail was updated a dozen years ago), we ended up spending three hours on a six-mile hike--and that, an abbreviated version of what was only supposed to be a 9 km round trip. There were ruins involved, of course, but after today, I believe I can speak for both myself and Elias when I say we've had our fill of the dinky ones. As Elias said, "I wish we could see some ruins that were never ruined."

Today's destination was the Ruinen Schneeburg, located atop the Schoenberg, near the village Merzhausen, on the southern edge of Freiburg. Built in the 13th century by the Lords of Hornberg, ownership had transferred by 1349 to the leaders of Ebringen, a town owned by the Kloster St. Gallen. The Burg was abandoned by 1500 because the commanding authority had built a new residence down the hill in Ebringen. Like the Zaehringer ruins, Schneeburg (which wasn't so named until 1575) became a casualty of the German Peasants' War in 1525.

We didn't make it home until 18:30. Despite the relatively late hour (by German standards), the Tuesday farmers' market in front of St. Urban church was still in full swing. We wrapped up our evening pleasantly with a dinner of homemade ravioli (half pesto, half sun-dried tomato/mozzerella) with diced tomatoes, parsley, and fresh garlic--all from the market. After Elias was in bed, Rodi and Renate returned from their two-day tour of Burgundy, bringing tales of Romanesque churches and one non-ruined Burg after another. They also brough a bottle of red wine, which, after a few months of the local Spaetburgunders, was startlingly rich and complex.

Confession

After weeks of resisting, I finally succumbed to temptation and snitched three grapes from the vines on the Tuniberg on my run/walk today. Two purple, one green-yellow. I know it was stealing, and officially, I won't do it again, even if other people are doing it too. (For the record, all three grapes were mighty tasty.)

Kaiserstuhl and Merdingen

Elias continues with jock soccer camp this weekend. He's still having fun, but we're learning how different soccer is in Germany compared to the US. None of that chipper YMCA it-isn't-whether-you-win-or-lose building-moral-fiber stuff here--it's all about the champs. Kudos to the few girls who manage to nurture their love for the game: of the 65 or so kids at the camp, 62 are boys.

After we dropped Elias off on Saturday, Stefan and I drove to Ihringen, on the southern end of the formerly volcanic Kaiserstuhl, and took the train around the mountain to Endingen. We then hiked the 17 km length of the mountain back to the car. The Kaiserstuhl offers a mix of forested peaks, grassy meadows, and terraced vineyards, along with a chapel on the Katherinenberg and a lookout tower on the Totenkopf (the highest point, 555m). A long portion of the trail had stone markers from 1772 and 1773, indicating the then-border between Austria and France.

After we picked Elias up, we drove over the Tuniberg to Merdingen for a wine and Zwiebelkuchen fest. Various clubs in town host food and drink stalls in the local vintners' courtyards. All the wine came from the Merdingen vintners' collective, and all the food was prepared by the clubs. We ended up buying an entire pan of Zwiebelkuchen--which in Baden means a very thin, crisp dough, with a sour-cream chopped-onion custard baked on top--in exchange for the men's chorus club making us a vegetarian one (hold the ham). Stefan asked if the chorus was going to sing and was told that after the wine had flowed long enough, everyone would be singing. Add to that the poems posted on the tent walls about how a good Zwiebelkuchen helps with the wind music, and you can imagine what things must be like by the time folks drag themselves home at 4 a.m. We were happy to have made it to Merdingen's fest, as the Merdinger Rot Spaetburgunder is our favorite so far.