Koenigstuhl

We are visiting our friends Hans-Walter and MaryBeth in Heidelberg, Germany for a few days before heading down to Freiburg, which means we are enjoying good company and eating well.

Today, Elias, Stefan, and I hiked up the Koenigstuhl (the local mountain or hill, depending on your standards) to the Max Planck Institut fuer Astronomie to meet Hans-Walter for lunch. We arrived an hour late because we got caught in a thunderstorm and had to hunker down in a shelter for about 30 minutes before continuing on in the rain. The sun emerged just as we reached our destination, but by then, Hans-Walter was late for a meeting, so we didn't get to see much of the Institute. We did enjoy seeing this lovely, late 19th-c. gate to the Sternwarte (observatory). I photographed it at an imposing angle, as the gate looked somewhat less elegant with the big recycling bin in the background.

Heidelberg

One of the nifty things about Germany is that you can walk from any town to pretty much any other town almost exclusively on designated pedestrian and bicycle paths. And so, just because it can be done, on Friday morning I set out on foot for Heidelberg, some 190 kilometers to the north of Freiburg. I made it as far as Koendringen, north of Emmendingen, when Stefan and Elias pulled up and offered to drive me the remaining 170km.

On my walk, I confirmed that the Rhine flood plain is flatter than central Illinois; that engineers have made the river Elz just as disturbingly straight as the Dreisam; that downtown Emmendingen is depressed and a little seedy; that J.S. Bach must have been quite the athletic young musical genius in 1705 when he walked 400 kilometers from Arnstadt to Luebeck to meet and hear Buxtehude; and that I will never run a marathon.

We were headed to Heidelberg for a pun-filled visit with Hans-Walter and MB that culminated in an ex-pat Thanksgiving dinner on Saturday. In addition to catching up with long lost friends, enjoying their wit, culinary talents and beautiful home, and cooking and baking and eating and watching everyone else cook and bake and eat, we found time to explore Heidelberg a bit. We followed in the footsteps of professional thinkers by taking a walk on the famous Philosophenweg, where our profound thoughts focused mainly on finding Elias a drink of water and locating the multiple-degrees-of-freedom swing H-W had recommended. Afterward, we climbed down the hillside and crossed over the old Neckar bridge into the Altstadt, where we were overwhelmed by a tsunami of other tourists and lived to tell the tale.

Following a thoroughly tasty gourmet Thanksgiving meal, Hans-Walter wiped the floor with Elias.