Alles hat ein Ende, nur die Wurst hat zwei.
(Everything has an end. Only the sausage has two.)
-German Maxim
To many Americans, Germany conjures many stereotypes. Apart from any war imagery, we might think of obese men in overalls with high white socks drinking giant glass mugs of beer. We also might imagine very scientific images of the Germans, and Churchill himself called them “the most educated, industrious, scientific, disciplined people in the world”. We might think of them as cold and distant. We might think they have a plan, a rule, and a checklist for everything. These stereotypes do come from somewhere. The image of a German man in overalls is in fact that of a man in lederhosen, or traditional leather trousers. These are still worn at festivals, though it is mostly kitsch. Germany consumes the third largest amount of beer per capita in the world, and they have thousands of breweries. Though I am sure not all Germans love order, but it is a part of their culture to have a plan and to stick to it. An old German adage says, “Orderliness is next to godliness.” Though of course they exist, I did not meet a German who did not think logically and speak directly, or vice versa. It is not that they are humorless or lack romance, but that they distrust appeals to emotion. (It makes them great shoppers).
But for every part of their culture, there is a counterpart that underlies it. One evening, just before it got too dark to ride any longer, Jenn got a flat tire about ten miles shy of Munich, making our lodging in a campsite impossible. We got her bike to a dry spot, and Chris left us to search for a place to stay. While she and I began working on the tire with numb fingers, a german guy in his early twenties stopped on his bicycle. He, along with most other Germans I met, spoke English quite well. He said he was on his way from work to his apartment, and asked us how we were doing, if we had an extra tire and the proper tools, and if we had found a place to stay because it was too wet and dark to ride to Munich. Respectively, we answered not so good, yes, and no but our friend was checking on a few places he saw on his phone because the hotel across the street was too expensive, but that we would be willing to stay almost anywhere, even an apartment (wink, wink). He told us that the hotel was probably the only place to stay, wished us luck, and moved along. I was afraid I might have hinted a little too strongly about the apartment. About half an hour later, Chris had found a cheap hotel five minutes ride back the direction we came and was on his way to catch the owner before he closed for the night. The same German guy happened to come back just as we were mounting our bicycles. He was surprised we were still there, and asked us if we had a place to stay yet. We told him yes and how much cheaper it was in comparison to the hotel across the street. He said, “It would have been free to stay in my apartment. You should have asked!”
Germans are quite helpful in their own way, but they do not try to catch hints or infer anything. It is the obligation of those in need to ask for what they are lacking, and the duty of the other to let them know if he has it. If he does, he will provide it if he can. Even kindliness is a logical procession. But the wisdom in doing things this way is that it protects people from social faux pas, and it makes for clear communication. It is, in fact, considered rude to expect inference of your true meaning.
There are many strange things about the orderliness of Germans to Americans like Chris, Jenn, and I. Yet the irony of that strangeness was that we had a day-by-day spreadsheet of our ride, sometimes with specific times we had to arrive and leave, things we had to see, and facts and figures about it all. It turns out that we were not so different, except that unlike a good German, we could not stick to the plan. We were only one day off our schedule on the sunny day we arrived in Germany, and we stayed that close to it for about a day longer, then weaved in and out of it sporadically on our bicycles, using trains to supplement. Many, if not most, local routes on the German train system run by Deutsche Bahn allow for bikes.
We decided we needed to stretch our legs that first day and rode from a nearby town’s train station to the university town of Freiburg, situated on the Rhine River amongst the green foothills of the Black Forest mountains. The air was fresh and clean, and the smell of pines and the sound of cuckoo birds with their cheery diatone chirps engulfed my senses as we set up camp for the first time. Chris and Jenn both had tents, though Chris was also tarp camping when it was not raining so bad. I only had a bivy shelter, which is a waterproof sack heightened at the head by an n-shaped tent pole. I am not prone to claustrophobia, so it worked well for me until I woke up in a torrent of water in Scotland. Another story for another chapter. All set up, we locked the bikes together, and took a stroll around the city.
Germany was quite a visual change from the parts of France I had seen, and Freiburg is the perfect example. The style of buildings were more standardized in shape and size, mostly half-timbered but sometimes framed by brown stone or bricks, and encased therein were lightly colored walls of red, green, blue, yellow, and any combination of them. Yet I never had that jolted feeling a clash of color often induces. Many structures would have what looked like steps cut out of the tops of walls leading to the apexes, and a short space below each step were high pitched roofs, mostly red clay, though some were slate and others wooden shingles. There were details about many buildings that were artfully done. Some had gold leafed highlights in intricate patterns on the eves, others had colorful window boxes under their windows, and still others had gargoyles popping out of the corners of the roof. Visible from most angles of Freiburg, were two pieces of architecture, common to much of what I saw of Germany: the dark gothic spire of the cathedral and the quaint belltower, with white walls cornered in by rectangular brown stones. Also, their fountains were far more colorful and ornate than those I saw in France. Inside every shop window were the various products being sold, arranged intricately and seductively. On many streets were inlaid tracks, and a tangle of wires above them, between which travelled gently clanking cable cars, arriving and leaving precisely on time. Throughout, there was a minding artfulness of a mercantile culture.
We ate and drank at the camp restaurant that night in Freiburg. What we experienced there was typical, and so this is perhaps the best place to also introduce German food and drink. As far as food, Germans ought to have no qualms about their food being too light to satisfy hunger. In nearly every town there is a bakery, a butchery, a supermarket, and a restaurant. Bakeries bake incredible amounts of bread, ranging in taste and texture from sweet and fluffy to sour and crusty, and they come in all different shapes and colors: ovular, skinny, squat, brown, white, and yellow, interchangeably. There are also loads of pretzels, some are for desert others for sodium induced heart attacks. For restaurant meals, in addition to sides of sauerkraut, the largest portion of my diet in Germany consisted of meat, piles of it at each meal. Most meat I ate was some sort of sausage, which come in all shapes and sizes and textures and tastes. I do not remember much that was green finding its way to my plate. In fact, in Freiburg Jenn tried to order a salad, and it consisted of strips of meat with a few onions thrown in a vinegar sauce, and no lettuce. At restaurants, I was served portions that even in my cycling hangriness (hunger to the point of being angry) I was not convinced I could consume, though I did. The rest of my diet was of pizza, which is the only thing served at the late hours we often arrived at our destinations.
As far as fluids, I am the least qualified of the three of us to comment, but I know this for sure: Germany makes some of the best beer. I am an inveterate lightweight, and I begin to lose focus and feel sleepy after no more than about 16 ounces of beer. So when I do drink it, I choose carefully and diversely (I do not have much of a chance to try more). There are three basic types: wheat, dark, and pale. My favorite was wheat, and amongst the many subtypes, my favorites were weissbier and hefeweizen, both of which, but especially the last, taste like bananas. My second favorite was schwarzbier, a dark beer, which is thick and chocolatey. For the most part, it was the summer of wheat beers, and aside from sparkling water with lemon (or just water), nothing satisfied me more after hot days on the road. Of course, I tried to stay near my bed.
Through pines still dripping from the last rain, I watched the golden northern sunset, then slept well in Freiburg. The next morning, we decamped and went to a bicycle shop to stock up on supplies, and to get Jenn front pannier racks for her bicycle. We were headed up the mountains to Lake Titisee, and in addition to the new pannier rack for Jenn, we gained a smiley middle aged German man from the shop on his lunch break as navigator. We rode down to the tree lined path by the river, past the modern buildings at the university, up a few green hills, and out into the open pastures and meadows at the foothills of the mountains. It got steeper and steeper as we rode deeper into the Black Forest. I realized quickly that I was working a lot harder than my fellow travellers to keep the same speed. I had not officially weighed my load, but from the airports in which I had weighed everything, I gathered I was carrying about 80 pounds, and at that point I had no food with me, only gear.
We stopped for a few moments to look at the spread of farmland below and the blue mountains above in the bright afternoon. When we started riding again I found we had gained two more travel companions, a pension aged couple from the Netherlands, bicycle tourists like us. A sunny summer day attracts cyclists together like cheerios in a bowl of milk.
There were several comments made about the weight I was carrying, and all of them in a wagging finger tone. The Dutch couple would say, “You should not have packed so much. Maybe ask your friends to help carry some of this. Too much for one person!” Then the German would fall back so he could watch me carefully, then speed forward beside me, “You should really rebalance your weight. Is there anything you can throw away? Maybe your friends can help carry some of this.” This happened in various ways several times, and I felt like Peter Gibbons in the movie Office Space: “Did you get the memo?”
The mountains got steeper, and the grades increased from hilly to alpine. There were times when I was standing on both pedals, stomping one foot then the other as hard as I could just to keep Samantha moving. It did not help that at one point I had a pinch flat and did not realize it. This was when the Dutch couple shamed me for the last time, and blazed fire up the mountain ahead of us. We did not catch up to them. With about an hour of light left, we finally summited and flew down the road past steep-roofed, flower box laiden, wooden farmhouses, by a large lake to a little restaurant. I do not remember the mileage for that day, though it was a little more than 40 miles. With the steepness that we faced, I would say we did pretty good. I did not face anything like those mountains again for several months.
We ate at the little restaurant as storm clouds moved in over the lake, then sped away to a campsite, where we pitched in the dark. We found company with a delightfully earthy expat from Liverpool and his still-British brother with his very-British girlfriend under the awning of a trailer (or a caravan as they called it). I slept hard that night, exhausted from the ride. My dreams were of the pro’s and con’s of each contribution to the weight I had heaved.
I awoke in a misty grey morning to find it had poured rain that night. The inside of my bivy shelter had condensated badly, and the down in my sleeping bag was getting mushy. We would need to stay somewhere dry the coming night so I could hang it up. We decided to start the day with a train down the mountain to save time, otherwise we would get badly off schedule. Before this, I had a shortlist of some items of which I could securely rid myself, and I took that train out of the Black Forest divested of a shirt, a pair of pants, a small notebook, my large multi-pocketed binder, and a few other items to the Liverpudlians. I was now about five to seven pounds down in weight.
The rest of the riding was far easier in comparison to that first day. We stayed mainly by rivers, which meant we were either going downhill with the flow, or only slightly uphill against it. The Mosel River was especially high due to unusual rainfall. This meant that the normal pristine riverbound bike routes, and some of our planned campsites, were often flooded over. Sometimes we would brave the flooded paths up to mid shin depth, but if we found ourselves at an impasse, we took alternatives, often through gingerbread-like villages. This slowed us down, but meant that we got to see more of the tourist-less small town bustle. One of the most intriguing feature of these towns were their high, brooding castles. One evening, in an electric blue dusk at a town called Cochem, I walked across a bridge and sat for nearly half an hour, mesmerized by a blanket of mist pouring down into a little gully and up in a spiral around a dark brown castle on a high hill. They are remnants of a time before two day shipping, when Germany was not a single country, but dozens of countries each imposing tolls on the rivers and roads. A new castle meant a new country.
Rainstorms came and went as they pleased and so did we until their pleasure meant we could not longer brake our bikes. The twists and turns of the river between the hills on either side made ethereal shapes out of the storms, with pockets of rain swirling down from the sky at angles, and translucent sheets layered behind one another at dips in the surrounding hills. When lightning started striking near us and the cracks of thunder sounded like gunshots and it became too wet, we would follow our noses to a bakery, or our ears to the laughter and clinking of mugs at a cafe, and consume the local fare. When it was dry enough, and the environment electrically equalized enough, we would ride again. Regardless of the weather, there were little wine shops or tasting booths along the bike paths, and I was sure to find a Jenn-less bicycle leaning against a post near them. I mostly stayed away from anything fermented while riding, otherwise I would be useless.
It was somewhere in this period that we at last came up with a name for ourselves. The Red Headed Gypsy Caravan was too long. The Chain Gang was tossed around, but we knew it had been taken and then taken a thousand times more. Nothing seemed to quite fit. Then a perfect timing of three events happened. I must first explain briefly that sitting on a bicycle seat tends to build up gas in the body. This gas has the tendency to discharge when one stands on the bike or dismounts. Such an event occurred as we dismounted to take a rest in a cafe. There, we discussed how it always seemed like as soon as we arrived anywhere, we had to make an exit. Back on the bicycles soon after, we entered a busy road and were looking for an exit, for which the German word is ausfahrt. Three minds came together, and the Ausfahrt Gang found their exit.
It was also around this time, that I faced the consequences of my spoke job in France. It was on a day that we wanted to visit Burg Eltz, one of the best maintained and most quintessential of German castles. A few miles out from the start, I heard a loud click. I rode another mile or so, thinking nothing of it. Then I heard a dangling sound, and stopped to find that a spoke had broken at the center of the back wheel. I took a train back to a small town and had it repaired, adding a few extra spokes onto my bill in case it happened again. Unfortunately, it did happen again. And again. And again several more times until I finally wised up and replaced them all with twelve gauge steel spokes several weeks later in Hungary. I learned an important lesson from this: don’t just fix the problem, fix the thing that’s causing the problem. Doing otherwise made each moment a mite less enjoyable because of the anxiety at every bump and pebble. While my poor wheel balancing job contributed, the quality of spokes were the real problem. Anyways, the castle was closed by the time we arrived, but we looked desperate, and a kind groundskeeper let us in for a few minutes while she locked everything up.
We made it to Koblenz, the crossways of the Mosel and Rhine Rivers, and went southeast down the Rhine where we took a train into the Bavarian region in the south. At last, we made the journey to Rothenburg ob der Tauber, of which I had been dreaming for years. Rothenburg is situated in rolling green hills. My memory of that ride has become rose-tinted, and all I recall are narrow country lanes, little farmhouses, stone bridges, and sheep and cattle in pasture all passing by, and with each pedal, a growing determination to reach every hilly horizon in case it might reveal my destination. At last a stone retaining wall came up in front of us on top of a hill. We entered it through a park, and I rode every inch of a grade that was probably near 20%. Finally, a medieval stone wall with a half-timbered gangway and a steep lumpy roof of wood shingles appeared, and in the middle of it, an arched gateway. I paused to take it in. This was it. The reason I started this adventure. This was all my years of dreaming right before my eyes. I almost did not want to go. It seemed too real, and not enough like the dreams I had. But as soon as I had that thought, my spirit rebelled and became absent of anything except go, go, go! So I set my foot on the pedal, lurched forward on the bumpy cobbled street, the arch swung overhead, and I entered a whole new part of my adventure.
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