Walking to Italy - Days 1 & 2 - Steinebach - Sankt Heinrich - Benediktbeuern

We arrived in Germany on June 1. After giving S a week to practice not breaking any bones, we headed out the front door on Thursday June 8 to hike to Italy.

We had rules:

1. No wheels allowed (no cars, no trains, no bicycles, etc.), except to return home at the end of the trip. 

2. No elevators. You just hiked 15 miles: you can take the stairs.

3. The Acrophobe's Exception: means of transportation that might unnerve acrophobes are allowed, specifically ferries (which we used, with no unnerving) and ski lifts (which we did not). (Note that glass elevators that traverse over ten stories are probably therefore allowed, although you're unlikely to find one in the Alps.)

Our planned route began as "hey, maybe we could hike to Innsbruck." That turned into "why stop at Innsbruck?", and then "we've never really liked Innsbruck, let's detour through Hall in Tirol instead." Voila:

The forecast leading up to the hike was persistently "rain, rain, and more rain," which was a great lesson in why you shouldn't trust forecasts more than a day or two in advance. We had pretty much perfect weather, save for a few 30-minute spans when we were grateful to have brought rain gear with us.

Oberbayern

Steinebach am Woerthsee, where S grew up, is in Oberbayern, a.k.a. Upper Bavaria. S insists "upper" here means elevation, not latitude: the Alps begin about 50 miles due south, so this part of Bavaria is higher in elevation than Lower Bavaria to the east. Wikipedia suggests otherwise--that Upper Bavaria is so named because it's upstream of Lower Bavaria along the Danube. In any case, we had to walk south through Oberbayern to get to Italy.

Day 1: Steinebach to Sankt Heinrich

My favorite kind of walk is the kind that begins with stepping out the front door and just...walking.

The oak trees along the Eichenallee ("oak alley") between Weßling and Seefeld are a designated cultural monument, with many of the trees dating back to 1770, when Count Toerring had them planted. Some have needed a little support over the years...

Germany has some whopping huge varieties of dandelion:

A lot of the terrain between the Woerthsee and the Starnbergersee looks like rural Midwest U.S.

The traumatized critters at the military shooting range between Frieding and Landstetten welcome you: 

Yellow iris are native plants here (vs. invasive back in Durham, NC).

Benches along trails = very German.

Sun dog snippet:

We eventually arrived in Tutzing am Starnbergersee...

 

"There's no life outside of Bavaria--and if there is, it isn't like this":

(To think that had I paid more attention in Latin class, I'd be able to say profound things like that instead of being limited to "semper ubi sub ubi"...)

Clouds rolled in while we waited for the ferry...

...but quickly dissipated.

By the time we neared Seeshaupt at the southern end of the lake, the Alps looked a little less off-in-the-distance. 

From Seeshaupt we walked another two miles around the lake to St. Heinrich, our destination for the evening. 

Of the two re-hydrating beverages below, which do you suppose costs more in Germany, Bier or Sprudel (carbonated water, a.k.a. Mineralwasser mit Gas)? 

After dinner we briefly fed the skeeters by the lake...

...then checked out the truffle that is Sankt Heinrich:

Ta da! 17.9 miles walked, ~ 1,100 ft elevation gain. 

Day 2: Sankt Heinrich to Benediktbeuern

The Alps--so close, and yet so far...

Getting closer...

Much of the day, we followed the Loisach River south...

Eine Kapelle...

Although shorter than our first day, the second day's main hike ended up being a bit of a slog--long, flat, dry, and hot. We were both carrying ~15 pound packs, we were still figuring out how much water we needed to carry, and we forgot to eat lunch. We were relieved to arrive at Kloster Benediktbeuern and to set our packs down. 

After a late lunch, we realized that a neighboring village that we had already tromped through had a visit-worthy church that we had failed to visit. We thus devised a loop hike back to Bichl to check out St. Georg.

On the way, Carly chatted with the locals:

We topped off lunch with some field-fresh strawberries. June is Erdbeersaison in Bayern.

St. Georg was duly photogenic...

Looping back toward Benediktbeuern, we passed some storks. June is Storchsaison in Bayern.

I'm sure this is "art," but, I dunno, it just seemed kinda weird. Don't cats usually have 6-8 nipples?

Having retraced our steps, we then checked out Kloster Benediktbeuern itself.

We had left Steinebach on Fronleichnam--the Feast of Corpus Christi. Since Bayern is mostly Catholic, every Catholic feast and its brother's uncle is not only a church holiday but also a state holiday. This meant that pharmacies had been closed on the first day of our hike. This was problematic because S had picked up his very first bout of poison ivy in Durham just before we left for Germany, and after letting it fester for a week ("wow, do you suppose this could be poison ivy? I wonder how long it will take to go away! I wonder what will happen if I scratch it!"), finally decided maybe he should do something about the remarkably expanding and oozing welts--but shucks, it was Fronleichnam, so that oozing would have to wait an extra day. We did finally stop off at a pharmacy in Benediktbeuern--the first town we visited on Friday that was large enough to have a pharmacy--and the pharmacist looked very impressed when S showed her his rash-covered arm...and also when he showed her the huge and abundant chigger-bite welts all over his torso that also needed a salve. (Word to the wise: do not bike 20 miles to a formal event in your biking duds and then change into formal clothes under cover of waist-high grasses in a chigger-infested field). Oh--and did I mention that while S did not break any bones his first week in Germany, he immediately came down with a cold, so he had the sniffles AND poison ivy AND chigger bites all at the same time? He's a trooper.

Anyway, the salves from the pharmacist in Benediktbeuern provided immediate relief, and the benefit of arriving in Benediktbeuern (and, well, every other church we popped into for the duration of our 11-day hike) after Fronleichnam was that the Fronleichnam banners were on display in the pews. Benediktbeuern had the snazziest banners of them all, reaching a good 10 meters up to the ceiling.

I tried a few times to symmetrically frame the cloister in this next photo, before realizing the ceiling wasn't actually symmetric. Such is the way with several-hundred-years-old handbuilt ceilings... 

Our final walk of the day was to the grocery store for some veggies and snacks for dinner. The bakery  had a sign stating that even though it is now legal to have bug parts in the baked goods, they found NO NEED to include bugs bits in theirs.

Ta da! 18.75 miles walked, ~670 ft elevation gain.