A packed Friday

On Friday, Stefan and I drove south to Staufen, then east, past Münstertal, and into the hills...

where we parked and began our hike up the beautiful...

Belchen (1414m). A helpful trail sign left little doubt about what direction we should take, until we encountered this...

fork just a dozen meters up the road. Stefan wisely checked the map, but it didn't show the fork, so we stayed to the left until...

we were strongly advised to go to the right. We had one last view of the...

valley behind us, where lay nestled the tiny village Kaltwasser, before we headed into the...

mossy...

woods. We saw nothing but trees, switchback after switchback, until at long last we emerged...

atop the ridge, with water vapor still burning off the mountain in the warmth of the late morning sunlight.

The Belchen is clearly a lovely place to spend the summer if you are...

a sheep or a goat or...

a cow.

We opted for...

a more open route back down, and observed that folks on the Belchen enjoy a little more flourish than those on Schauinsland when it comes to...

stacking wood. After we walked back through...

Kaltwasser to our rental car, we decided to drive to...

Staufen for some coffee, seltzer, and ice cream. I believe Germany is one of the only countries in the world where one can make an occasion of going out for seltzer.

We made it back to Freiburg in good time to see...

the play Elias's summer camp put together. The play is about a king who locks up his daughter because she doesn't want to get married; but then he begins to have regrets and sends a dragon from Toulouse to look after her. First the dragon has to track down the princess; a rabbit is unable to help, and the dragon subsequently receives conflicting directions from two foxes (shown above). Eventually he learns that the princess has been stolen from her tower by a band of robbers; the dragon rescues her and...we have to go back next Friday to see how the story ends, since the play isn't done yet. (Elias won't be in camp next week, so he'll be in the audience rather than on stage.)

Can there be a better way to top off a great day than to go see...

your two favorite German soccer teams face off in an exhibition game at a small town field in Bahlingen am Kaiserstuhl? How fortuitous that we happened to be in town during the Kaiserstuhl Cup! SC Freiburg beat 1860 Muenchen, 2:0, scoring a dramatic second goal just before the clock ended. Other highpoints of the evening included two storks flying over the field into the setting sun, and the absence of vuvuzelas.

Getting around, part II

This morning after Elias left for camp, I walked out the front door and headed south through...

Herdern, past...

the Schwabentor bordering the Altstadt, through...

the Wiehre neighborhood, with all its big snazzy Jugendstil houses, and all the way to...

the old monastery gate at the edge of the village Guenterstal, where I cut east into the...

wooded hills. I had five kilometers behind me, and my goal ahead was the top of Freiburg's nearest sizeable mountain, Schauinsland, a mere 8.5 or 9 kilometers further away, depending on whether I believed or followed...

any of the signs. The signs are quite detailed, as you can see, but they aren't terribly accurate when it comes to distances, and while one trail intersection might have signs pointing you toward 20 different places, another intersection might not have any signs at all. Remember this, remember this, remember this, and do not be lured into false hope by the signs. Instead, carry a good topo map. But don't entirely rely on the map either, since there are always dozens more trails to choose from in real life than will ever fit onto any map, such as the trail less traveled that led me to this...

mossy bench next to a rivulet. (I'd amuse myself and call it a mossy Bank, since Bank is German for bench, but I'm told puns aren't funny in German, and even a bilingual one is probably a stretch). The trail spit me back out on a gravel road with a bucolic view of...

sheep. My route threatened to descend back down into Guenterstal, so when I came to a junction, I headed upwards into more...

woods. There were lots of...


wildflowers; and of course no hike here would be complete without abundant...

stinging nettles. The scenery stayed rather...

consistent for several kilometers, until I gained enough elevation to enjoy a...

rewarding vista of the valley below. The subsequent views included...

more woods. Eventually, I passed under...

the Seilbahn line that runs from the town Horben, in the valley below, up to the top of Schauinsland. The Seilbahn crossing was a welcome sight, because from there on, the trail straightened out somewhat, although it became steeper. I turned onto a mountain-bike path, where I saw a sign warning travelers about...

horse flies (Bremsen). Oh wait, silly me, the B is lower case: bremsen is a verb: so not "Attention, horse flies," rather "Attention, brake." Further ahead, I crossed the only...

bridge of the entire hike, and then number 483,000 out of about a bazillion...

piles of tidily stacked wood. Only...

2.5 kilometers to go (no, no, don't believe the signs!): past copious, sun-kissed expanses of...

wildflowers, past...

the two giant windmills, to a rocky trail that climbed upward, crossed the paved main road, and then terminated at an unmarked T-intersection. No trail sign? Surely that meant either option--left or right--would end up at the top of the mountain. Did I check my map? No, no. I took a left onto a nice wide graded gravel road, because my ultimate goal was the end of the Seilbahn line, and the Seilbahn was now quite a ways to my left. The gravel road continued on and on, passed under the Seilbahn line, and continued on and on some more until it reached...

a dead end. Realizing I had inadvertently added a few extra kilometers to my hike, I cursed loudly (in English, because I haven't lived in Germany long enough to instinctively curse in German) before cutting down to the...

paved road. After walking a short while, I saw a...

Naturschutzgebiet (nature preserve) trail that wasn't on the map. It offered a significant shortcut, as well as some...

fine views, before meeting up again with the paved road, which I followed the rest of the way to my...

final destination, where...

this handsome guy was waiting for me. The grand total: five hours, 23.3 kilometers (significantly more than 5 + 9, you might observe), and one kilometer elevation gain. (Stefan, for his part, biked 69 kilometers round trip in a little over three hours, climbing a combined total of about 1440 meters: Freiburg-Zaehringen-Heuweiler-St. Peter [break for a hazelnut pastry]-Unterriebental-Kirchzarten-Oberried-Hofsgrund-Schauinsland-Freiburg.)

After half a liter of Sprudel (seltzer), a Heidelbeershake (you'd think that would translate as blueberry milkshake, but it's actually a foamy lukewarm puree of blueberries and milk), and a plate of Pommes (fries)--a nutritious vegetarian lunch if there ever was one--I took the fast way home:

Titisee

Stefan couldn't find a store in Freiburg that rents racing bikes, so today we drove to Neustadt to rent one there. Afterward, we thought we'd check out scenic Titisee, reputed to be an idyllic lake-town gateway to the Black Forest.

Surely it was, once. Now it's an international summer vacation destination for people who want to kick back and relax in the company of a few thousand like-minded tourists. The camping is European Lake Style, meaning rows and rows of RVs and tents are squashed together like sardines. The lake offers some good photo ops if you can coordinate views unobstructed by people.

After an initial look at Titisee, we headed away from town, eventually hitting a trail that took us past old farm houses and into green mossy woods. Ahh, much better.

Schumann Wahlfahrt

You'd think that because 2010 is the 200th anniversary of Robert Schumann's birth, every organ concert this year from here to Berlin would feature at least one of the composer's intriguingly unidiomatic organ works, in the same way organists celebrated Felix Mendelssohn's 200th Jubelaeumsjahr last year. Of course, Mendelssohn wrote a lot more music for the organ than Schumann did, and his holds together better, and it isn't so stormily melodramatic or--how should I say it--puppy-doggishly confident. But with such a small opus, it would seem easy enough to play all of Schumann's organ works, from the brilliant cream-of-the-crop to the so-so ones--and be done with them, just for the record.

Alas, this is not to be. The baroque church in St. Peter is offering a series of six summer organ concerts, and would you believe this past Sunday's was the only one to program anything by Schumann? Knowing this in advance, of course we had to go.

We didn't have access to a car, so first we walked 1.5 miles to the Hauptbahnhof, took a train to Kirchzarten, caught a bus to Stegen, misunderstood the driver and got off one stop too late, near Eschbach, guessed we might find a trail behind a recently-mowed hay field, and ended up at a creek. Since Stefan was the only one of us wearing waterproofed shoes, he gallantly carried me and Elias to the far bank. There we followed a path covered with a lifetime supply of sheep poop until it disappeared in a field. We waved to the sheep across the fence, then switchbacked through the waist-high grasses and flowers until we found a logging road that went directly up the Berg.

The logging road eventually ended at a huge pile of sawed up pine trees--uncharacteristically untidy for Germany--so we descended a bit and took an alternate route: a muddy wildflower- and weed-covered road that ended at a fence in a field of stinging nettles and raspberry brambles. After squeezing through a gap in the fence, we comforted an understandably distraught, scratched-up, stinging-nettle-zapped Elias, decided we'd have better luck bushwhacking through pine branches, and retraced our steps. Trail-less, we continued upward around branches, over sticks and moss-covered rocks, through thinning brambles and nettles, until at last we reached a graded gravel road. There, Elias and I traded right socks, as his was threatening to give him a blister, and we briefly admired that my size 10 foot fits into the sock of a nine-year-old boy.

When the gravel road met up with a mostly paved one, Elias offered a sacrificial gelatin-free gummi bear to a patch of stinging nettles, and it was relatively easy going after that. We followed the ridge for a few more miles, eventually encountering fourteen stations-of-the-cross markers that led us down to St. Peter.

Looking at the photographs above, taken from the ridge, you're probably thinking the hike was pretty easy. I didn't take any pictures of the miserable bits with the evil expanse of stinging nettles. The photo to the left, taken at a small open spot with a wee tilting chapel surrounded by the sourest blackberries in the world, hardly does justice to the incline.

We arrived in St. Peter about 20 minutes before the concert, and stopped off at a little cafe across from the church for the quickest and tastiest Kuchen inhalation ever. Then into the church we went for some Buxtehude, Couperin, and--bestill my beating heart--Schumann.

Johannes Götz played Schumann's B-A-C-H fugues numbers 5 and 2 and the canon in A-flat, and I learned that I am not the only organist baffled by certain aspects of these pieces. It's no wonder Clara Schumann was able to build an entire career out of being the only person who could properly interpret her husband's musical genius. I'm certain that despite their bizarreness, these pieces can be played convincingly, and I'm giving myself the rest of 2010 to figure out how to play the B-A-C-H fugues in a way that, short of leaving me satisfied, at least doesn't make me irritated.

As an encore, Götz played a transcription of Schumann's Lied, "Im wunderschönen Monat Mai," which ends inconclusively on the dominant of the submediant. In nontechnical terms, that means that most of the audience sat in stunned silence waiting for the piece to end, not realizing it already had.

After the concert, we headed to our favorite Italian restaurant and ate gnocchi on the balcony, watching storm clouds roll in over distant Freiburg. Then: a bus to Denzlingen, a train to Herdern, and a rainy walk to Urbanstrasse, and we were home. All in all, quite a fine day.