Bayern hike photo dump 1: Steinebach to Paterzell

I set off at 7:30am on Friday morning, 4/22, planning to meet Stefan at the Herrsching ferry dock for a 9:30am ride to Dießen.

Bright eyed and bushy tailed in Steinabach

Morning sky between Auing and Hechendorf

Soccer rivalries play out on pedestrian signs in Hechendorf

Look! It's Stefan's orthopedist on a billboard at the Herrsching train station!

An hour and a bit later, Stefan took the S-Bahn to Herrsching. I caught up with him in the Kurpark, where he was experimenting with walking on just one crutch, despite having told me he'd be really reeeeeally careful during the week I'd be gone.

We arrived at the dock in excellent time, but the ferry was nowhere in sight. Turns out that I had failed to read the schedule fine print: the boats had been back in operation since April 15, but the early ferry wouldn't run again until the end of the month. Shucks.

This gave us over two hours to hang out in Herrsching before the next ferry. We dropped by a grocery store, a pharmacy,...

Covid has had a lasting impact at the pharmacy.

...and a café, before heading back to the dock.

Two ducks determine a line; three non-colinear ducks determine
a plane. After taking a dozen duck photographs, I understood
the significance of "getting all one's ducks in a row."

The Marienmünster in Dießen

By the time we arrived in Dießen, we were ready for lunch. Gentle reader, I won't bore you with a photo of the first--and so far only--Kaesespaetzle I've eaten this year, so instead, here's a photo of Stefan enjoying the thought of eating Spaetzle:

After lunch, Stefan headed back to the ferry dock, and I headed up to the Marienmünster, which, surprisingly, I've apparently only blogged about once before. 

The faithful may or may not be helped by touching Saint Mechtilde's stone pillow.

Several hours later than originally planned, I finally made it past Dießen and into the countryside.

Just outside of Raisting were U-pick tulips:

St. Remigius in Raisting:

In Raisting, as is the case all over Bayern, storks bring babies:

The shutters on this house are real; the rest of the window decor is trompe d'oeil:

More countryside. Germans take tree-trimming very seriously, whether roadside, in fields, or in the woods.

Stillern is a teeny tiny town that--judging from the sign below--is 573 meters above sea level. I hadn't planned my trip to follow any single trail, but much of the day I followed the King Ludwig trail. 

The day's hike ended by going through the Eibenwald, Germany's largest yew forest, and one of its oldest nature preserves (1939). The preserve has over 2,000 yew trees, many of which are several hundred years old. They were unexpectedly amazing.

Many of the trees were hollow inside.

Lesser celandine is invasive in NC, but native in Germany, where it clearly thrives.

My destination for the evening: the Hotel Landgasthof "Zum Eibenwald" in Paterzell.

The window view, a premonition of things to come.
Can you see the Alps? Me neither.

Ta da! 19.4 miles (not counting the ferry ride).

App amusements

Well, that was excellent! Before I start posting Steinebach-to-Immenstadt photo dumps, some observations about two apps: Meteoblue and Komoot.

Locals recommended Meteoblue as the most accurate weather forecasting site. My cell phone kept translating the site from German to English, so I would get forecasts like this:

What day of the week is Mrs.? That would be Friday, Freitag, abbreviated Fr, which is an abbreviation for Frau, which is Mrs. in English. I'm not sure how my cell phone translator managed to get from Sa (Samstag) to sat (Saturday, obviously, but written as the past tense of sit). On Fridays, the sat forecast is not actually for morning--it's just translated that way because Morgen means both tomorrow and morning. I can't explain why Sunday, Sonntag, made it through the translator as So, with a capital S, rather than so, but I enjoy thinking of it as an exclamation. So. Despite these amusing quirks, auto-translate software has come a huge way since the last time we were in Germany on a sabbatical.  

Turns out the Meteoblue mobile website is psychologically more helpful than the app, with variably [in]accurate hourly predictions rather than variably [in]accurate 3-hour predictions. It took me a few days to notice that the website always includes a statement on the accuracy of the forecasts, from "the forecast for Friday is very stable and a high level of accuracy is assumed" to "the forecast for Sunday is wildly changeable and who knows what's going to happen."

The most accurate weather forecasting tool I found on my trek was in a yard just west of Roßhaupten:

Stone Age Weather Station:
Stone - dry = sunny
Stone - wet = rain
Stone - moving = stormy
Stone - in water = flooding
Stone - steamy = heat + rain
Stone - grey = hoarfrost
Stone - white = snow
Stone - not visible = fog
Stone - up above = world upside down
Stone - gone = thievery 

Komoot, which I used for route planning and navigation, was indispensable. It has a few faults--like directing me to cross a bridge in Immenstadt that was still under construction and did not yet span the river, and often telling me to go left when it meant right or right when it meant left, or remaining silent at two- or three-pronged forks in the road--but I eventually came to understand its left-right-straight [il]logic, and I relied on its excellent maps to walk 182 km (113 miles) across southern Bavaria. 

Apparently I turned on a Komoot setting that told it to speak to me in English when navigating; this provided regular doses of entertainment. Clearly Komoot has a limited database on how to pronounce English vowels and consonants. The letter y was consistently pronounced as in hyphen, so I was often told to continue straight for e.g. fiff-tye meters. Komoot always pronounced German street names as though they were in English, which was (1) totally unnecessary and (2) if you know even the bare minimum of how to pronounce words in German, amazingly hard to purposely botch as well as Komoot botches it. For example, Dießener Straße (roughly DEEssenehr SHTRAHsseh) becomes dyeSENNur STRASS and Bergweg (roughly BEHRG VAYG) becomes BRG whegg.

Steinebach to Immenstadt

Tomorrow I head out on my first multi-day hike in Germany, solo. I've joked for years that I know enough German that I won't starve in a marketplace, and now we get to find out if that's true! 

My original plan was to hike from Stefan's childhood home in Steinebach am Woerthsee to our 2009 sabbatical home-away-from-home, Freiburg im Breisgau--a distance of about 350 km (taking a southern enough route to enjoy views of the Alps). I invited Elias to hike with me, and he suggested that perhaps he might enjoy spending just a wee bit of time between the end of his spring semester and the start of his summer internship doing something other than walking all day long.

We found a happy compromise by splitting my trek into two parts: first, Steinebach to Lindau over eight days in April; second, with Elias, Freiburg to Konstanz over eight days in May, following the historic Querweg.

Stefan decided to join me by car and bike for the first trek. His plan was to drive ahead each day to our hotel for the evening, unload his bicycle, and go for a scenic ride; we'd then meet up again in the evening. Obviously his broken leg has nixed that. But all is not lost. I'll be walking solo, but I'll stop two days short of Lindau, in Immenstadt--chosen because it has a train station. Stefan will meet me there on the last afternoon of my trek. This is six days from now, and we're both reasonably confident that he'll be mobile enough to be a tourist and enjoy the scenery. We're hoping to eventually complete the Immenstadt-Lindau gap together this summer, over a less strenuous 3-4 days, once he's had more time to recover.

In May, Elias and I will tweak the end of the Freiburg-Bodensee Querweg route by turning off the trail in Wahlhausen (several km before Konstanz) and taking a ferry across the Bodensee to Ueberlingen, where Stefan will pick us up. This detour will save Stefan about an hour of driving (assuming he's back to driving by then). From Ueberlingen, we'll continue on to Steinebach for a quick visit to celebrate Tante Puppi's 100th (!) birthday, after which Elias will head to the airport and Stefan and I will drive back to Freiburg.

I've been obsessively checking weather forecasts all week. Just like the forecasts in NC, the German forecasts change significantly from one day to the next; what started as probably sunny all week shifted to probably drenchingly rainy all week, to mostly cloudy, and now back to rainy. The wettest day will be my longest hiking day (Lechbruck to Zell near Eisenberg), so I've tweaked that route to include a few villages where I can pause to dry out and possibly find something warm to eat or drink. The day was supposed to end with some hilltop ruins; I'm planning to backtrack to see them the following morning instead, weather permitting.

I've been meaning to test pack my backpack all week, but instead I've been filling it with groceries or paperback books for weight. Since I'll be sleeping in hotels, I won't need to carry a sleeping bag or tent, which means a significantly lighter load than I'd be carrying in the U.S. In contrast to National Forest camping in the U.S., dispersed camping in Germany is not allowed. Campgrounds aren't always easy to find, and they often cost half as much as a hotel, so I'm going to enjoy a bed and shower every night.

Pilgerfahrt an Andechs

The day after Stefan's accident, before we had figured out how to use the hospital's designated smoking section to circumvent no-visitors rules (and before he was mobile enough to scoot himself there), and after I had emailed or phoned everyone who needed emailing or phoning with updates, I headed off for a long walk to Andechs. What was previously a one-way hike with a ride home at the end has morphed over the past two visits into an 18-mile roundtrip hike. 

We joke that the walk begins just outside of Auing by turning right at the goats.

A few km later, climb up to Schloss Seefeld...

...through the judiciously forested woods behind the Schloss...

...up to Widdersberg...

The 2019 Maibaum is still up; 2020 and 2021 were presumably
skipped because of Covid. I'll check back for 2022 after May 1.

...and up onto the trail over Herrsching...

...where the wood anemone were blooming in full glory...

...and then to this little creek. This creek crossing is the way to avoid getting onto the wrong trail--the one that ends in broken beer bottles and trash. Happy to have finally figured this out thanks to a Komoot.com map.

Up ahead, Kloster Andechs.

Getting closer, the trail becomes steep enough that photo ops offer a welcome chance to pause and catch one's breath. 

A quick stop inside the Baroque church to refresh my memory about the decor...

...a quick look toward the town of Andechs and the mountains to the south... 

...then up to the Biergarten to bow my head before the heilige Breze, Obazda, und Sprudel.

After this repast, I headed to the gift shop. They had a rack of guardian angel charms for every birth date of the year--but Stefan's birthday was sold out.

I took a different route back, down through the Kienbachtal behind Herrsching...

Past the reminder that not all bicyclists are as lucky as Stefan...

On 28 May 1911, 35-yr-old Georg Dilnertshofer from
Winkl-Egling had a bike wreck here and died shortly afterward.

The trail ends in Herrsching...

...where I passed this Eastcoast-living shop.

I tanked up with lemon gelato and a quick look at the Alps beyond the lake...

..and headed toward Hechendorf. I had never noticed the smiley face on the church in Hechendorf until I looked at this photograph. Up close and in person, the sundial doesn't look like a mouth at all, but now that I've seen it, I'll probably never un-see it...

Through the fields behind Hechendorf, heading back toward the goats, I thought about how nice it would have been to be able to skip these last few km. At the same time, this hike was longer and had fewer breaks than any single-day hike I've planned for an upcoming multi-day trip, so I'm feeling well prepared.

Ta da!

The next day, when Berthold and I met up with Stefan in the Weilheim hospital's designated smoking area, I gave Stefan a box of essentials and goodies, including this pewter leg from Andechs, tastefully paired with a blood-red ribbon and proportionately long nail from home. (Leibniz butter cookie included for scale.) 

And then I walked 14 miles from Weilheim to Herrsching--so I'm feeling pretty confident that I can walk long distances on successive days.

Change in plans

Well wouldja get a look at this guy? This was last Wednesday, outside the Krankenhaus in Weilheim, where the ambulance took him a week ago Monday after he crashed his bike in a ditch avoiding a head on collision with a driver who was on the wrong side of the road. There's no road rash on him this time, because all of the impact energy went into breaking his right femoral head. One 24 cm pin, a few screws, and two days later, he was getting around with this snazzy Lamborghini. No visitors were allowed because of Covid restrictions, but patients could come outside to smoke cigarettes, so we visited in the designated smoking area. He came home last Thursday, with a few months of PT and recovery ahead of him. This definitely puts a dent in sabbatical plans, but he's going to be OK. Do not try this at home.

On the bright side, I can spend at least the next several months not worrying about him having another bike wreck.

Photo below shows Stefan and his niece Hanna tromping across a field outside of Widdersberg yesterday. Stefan is experimenting with a cane-crutch combo, so Hanna is holding the other crutch. I was walking with two hiking poles, and we were all walking at Stefan's snail's pace. We thought perhaps our crutch and cane dependent trio made this dandelion-filled field appear ominous to other hikers, but it's really hard to make cheerful dandelions look dangerous...

How to get over jetlag in 29,664 easy steps

Turns out that spending a few hours outside in the sun goes a long way toward resetting the internal clock. The day we arrived, we walked a loop from Steinebach am Woerthsee to Herrsching am Ammersee and back.

The signs below amused me. I suspect the first sign, posted on a fence bordering a private yard, was printed in Prussia, given the precise 120o angles between pooplets. In contrast, the Bavarian Nature Conservancy No-Dog-Poop signs show a dog that just take one solid asymmetric dump. Given that there was a pile of poop in the yard in front of the 120o symmetric pooplet sign, I conclude that Bavarian pooches don't understand Hoch Deutsch anti-poop signs.

Some views of the Ammersee...

Houses in rural Bavaria are often painted with imagery. The images below, from Hechendorf, were painted by the homeowner, who specializes in Lueftlmalerei ("diminutive-clouds painting").

Zooming in on this one shows local terrain: Schloss Seefeld in the foreground, the Ammersee and Kloster Andechs in the middleground, and the Zugspitze (Germany's tallest mountain) in the background.

A blog revived

And we're back. The world is a different place on scales small and large.

Helen's very long life ended just before the pandemic shut the world down in 2020; she was four days shy of her 97th birthday, and Stefan was with her.

The family house has since become the family AirBnb, our home base for this trip.

We're here because Stefan has a sabbatical this semester, the kidlet is away at college, and we're free to roam. Stefan's goals include collaborations, grant writing, course prep, and other academic work from afar; mine include enjoying being along for the ride and hiking. We also plan to sort through remaining family memorabilia stored in the attic and back room.

We have arrived armed with 50 KN95s, to last the two of us the next four months. Mask mandates are waning, but Germany's covid curve looked like this when we left Durham:

...so we'll be playing things safe for a while. On the bright side, about 76% of the population here is fully vaccinated, vs. about 66% in the US; and about 60% of folks here have received a booster shot, nearly double the boosted rate in US. Covid cases are way up here, but the death rate is half that in the US. 

We arrived on April 2 to this view: 

Three days later, it had turned to this:

The weather has been waffling back and forth since then. I haven't ever been in Bavaria in the spring, but I think we can safely call this typisches Bayerisches Fruehlingswetter--which is like typisches Bayerisches Sommerwetter but a few degrees cooler and with occasional snow pellets.