Just off the so-called Romantic Road, Rothenburg ob der Tauber in the Bavaria region is the quintessence of medieval Germany, at least to my American imagination. It is also exactly where I would think Santa Claus and his elves would make all their toys if they hadn’t already chosen the North Pole. Colorful buildings, often half-timbered and leaning from age, sit on top of stony streets, overlooking hills green and hazy. In the pristine shop windows are traditional Christmas fare: nut crackers, stuffed animals, illustrated cards, toys, and ornaments, often with a model train weaving in and out of them with little puffs of steam shooting from its chimney. In other windows are assortments of chocolates and pastries, including schneeballen (German for snowballs), shortcrust pastries covered in sugar or chocolate (I love them, Jenn and Chris did not), and in others are books, maps, globes, watches, and clocks. There is a market square in front of St. James’ church, clock towers throughout the city, and it is all surrounded by a quaintly uneven medieval wall, on top of which you can walk most of the circumference of town.
With all this classic cuteness, you might guess the place is popular with tourists, but you would be wrong. It is totally smothered with them. Sans drywall and Mickey Mouse, it feels a lot like Disneyland. Travelling in packs and segregated by language, day visitors flock to the city. Contrary to the reserved and low key Germans, they are loud and pushy. You cannot go down a single street without nearly being plowed over by someone too busy taking a selfie to pay attention to where they are walking. So much has a tag hanging out of a corner or a copyright at the end, I am surprised the town hasn’t trademarked their name.
It was not because of this that I began to feel let down. I do not regret it for a second that this was where I dreamed of riding my bike. It is touristy, sure, but it is also a quintessential part of Germany, and tourism does not stop a place from being beautiful. It was because this felt like the end of my journey. For whatever reason, there was something in that imaginative center of my brain that never reconciled with the fact that my vision was being accomplished halfway through the journey. This was what started the idea of this journey, and poetically, this should have ended it. But the reality of logistics and scheduling made this impossible. I did not know what my next goal was and I had no real vision for the rest of the adventure, just random images and desires with nothing connecting them. In comparison to my pre-Rothenburg arrival, I felt hardly any drive to continue travelling.
I am thankful that I had Chris and Jenn with me during this time. Having others’ opinions and plans gave me something to hold onto while I reformulated my own. We stayed awhile in Rothenburg, then rode on towards Munich, where we spent a full day and a couple of nights at a tent hostel. Munich is one of the largest cities in Germany, and the capital of Bavaria. It was mostly destroyed in World War II, but unlike the other large cities in Germany who rebuilt in a slick modern style, Munich was remade to look like its classic self with green copper domes and baroque buildings. We went to see the glockenspiel at the rathaus (town hall), with two layers of figures doing a joust on top and a dance on the bottom. And of course, we ate dinner at the barrel shaped Hofbräuhaus. It is a classic brew hall, bustling with massive liter glasses of beer carried in the half dozen or more with skill by waiters and waitresses in classic Bavarian dress to thirsty visitors from all corners of the globe. Everyone is seated together at communal dark wood tables. At the center of it all is a band of lederhosen-clad players of brass and wind instruments.
It was a fitting end for the Ausfahrt Gang to end their adventures in Deutschland. The next day, we rode the bicycle lanes, with actual bicycle traffic jams, took a train to Traunstein, and rode to the powder blue Salzach River. Eventually we came to a bridge and crossed into Salzburg, Austria, playing the Indiana Jones theme on a bluetooth speaker.
Austria was one of the two monarchies that constituted the mighty Austro-Hungarian Empire. Before its collapse as a result of World War I, it encompassed nearly all of Eastern Europe well into Ukraine, and the ruling Habsburg family had their fingers in nearly every European nation’s pie, at least through marriage if not through a ridiculously complex arrangement of treaties and trade agreements. As a result of this, its culture has had more time to refine itself, and its roots are more deeply grown into the western psyche than its neighbor Germany, who only became a nation in the late 19th century. Like their neighbors, Austrians speak German, but in a more lyrical accent. They are a very conservative country in the sense that they do not enact change quickly (for example, smoking is still allowed indoors).
Salzburg is the classic city showcased in The Sound of Music. The powder blue Salzach River divides the city between its old and new parts, and it is dominated by its castle high on a hillside that overlooks the beautiful blue lakes and mighty mountains surrounding the area. It is also the birthplace of Mozart, and was the epicenter of European music and art centuries ago. We did plenty, including a river cruise and a tour of the fortress overlooking the whole shebang. We stayed our nights at a campsite. This was where we met an old Belarusian man, transient of both place and mind. Remarkably, we encountered him twice in the city outside the campsite, and each time he picked up where he left off in the middle of one of two monologues: the first being about his stingy American friend who wouldn’t pay for him to visit, and the second about how cold Belarus was. It rained nearly everyday, so we decided to get dry and take a bus to Eagle’s Nest, technically in Germany. It is a quaint restaurant sitting mightily on one of the most dramatic views I have ever seen, with the German alps as walls on three sides, and green valleys with pristine blue lakes spread out like a mere carpet below. It is hard to believe it was the getaway residence of the likes of Adolph Hitler and his heads of state. On our way back, we visited Hellbrun Palace, which is like a small proto-waterpark with its trick fountains that work silly faces in the walls, make copper cones defy gravity, and which come out of hidden holes in seats and sidewalks to the surprise of those on the tour. We capped our time in Salzburg off with a dinner at the Augustiner brewery, a monastery-turned-pub, which looks everything like it sounds.
Vienna was the last stop where the Gang would all be together. The ride from one city to the next was quite easy on a river route. Earlier I had said that Austria is a conservative place, but I certainly do not mean this in terms of public nudity. Our riding days in the country were filled with sights of (mostly old and fat) people in naught but their skin, tanning, stretching, and jumping in the river. After Spain, I was used to public nudity, but I still felt a giggle every once in awhile.
Vienna was obviously once the glory of an empire. Its boxy palaces and concert halls are massive, numerous, and ornate on the interiors and in the gardens. Most famous of the palaces is the yellow Schönbrunn Palace, where some of the greatest world leaders were born, including many of the Hapsburgs, and some of the biggest decisions in history were made. King of the many music halls (with classical chamber music played year-round) is the massive and elegant Staatsoper, where many landmark operas were premiered.
We stayed in an AirBnB above a community bar, pretty far from the Ringstrasse, which is the main stretch of cable car tracks around the center of town. We spent a good amount of time eating downstairs next to the regulars, who spent much of their lives drinking and smoking there. This distanced me from a soiled experience I had in Vienna when I had been there in college. One day, I jaywalked across a small alley that had a useless crosswalk on it, and a horseback police officer blew his whistle and trotted quickly over to me to scold me and ask for my passport before letting me off the hook “only once”. A local ticket scalper, dressed in a wig and classical era clothing, said that he always thanked police officers when they got him in trouble because he knew they were really protecting him from his own wrong choices. Call me a red-blooded American, but I cannot think of anything more perverse than the belief that it is the government’s job to protect me from myself. As a result, I came to believe that Austrians were pushovers, far too fond of the rules. But the humor and lackadaisicalness of the characters that passed in and out of that little bar confirmed that this was an isolated incident. Austrians have far fewer rules than their fellow German-speaking countries to the North and the West, and can be delightfully lazy and tardy.
I have sung opera in choir and vocal juries throughout my life, yet I have never seen an opera. It is an experience that I have always wanted to have. I am afraid, however, that I did not do justice to the decorum, of both place and people, of the Vienna staatsoper. I appreciate the fact that they have standing rooms for the more common among us, and a loose dress code that requires only a shirt, a pair of long pants for men or a decent length skirt for women, and shoes. But I will not apologize for the fact that I did not fulfill the spirit of their dress code by wearing my greasy zip pants and sweaty shirt to a showing of Macbeth. And I am certainly not ashamed of my brother for wearing sweatpants. I think we appreciated the fineness of the art as much as anyone in a tux.
Eventually, a dreaded morning came. Chris packed until late at night after the opera, then he took a taxi to the airport that morning. Jenn and I left our bicycles in nearby storage place and went to a train station. At about the same time, we departed to different corners of the world: Chris for Japan, and Jenn and I for Prague. The fellowship of the Ausfahrt Gang was broken, though it survives in spirit and shall never pass from the place it holds in its members’ hearts. Nay, it shall live on, and perhaps pass from generation to generation of tired, salt crusted, sunburned, hungry, thirsty, probably at least somewhat irritated yet inspired travellers who dare to take the roads less travelled, making something out of their adventures and their lives, something out of the ordinary and filled with moments of loss and of triumph and even of glory.
Sorry, I get so passionate. What I meant to say was that even though I still had Jenn, there is always a vacuum created when a travel partner leaves. The slow turning of time and of new experiences in new places with new people eventually filled it.
That morning, as the train clacked along to a new land and a new people, two things dawned on me: I was travel weary and the adventure was not half over. So much still lay ahead, yet I could not escape the constant feeling of being stuck between options. Do we want to go to the mountains or the sea? The cathedral or the museum? A campsite or a hostel? All the colors of travel started slipping into grey, and there was no ultimate goal to help me sort out the daily onslaught of decisions. I had finished the part I had dreamed of: riding into Rothenburg on my bicycle. What lay ahead, I still wanted to experience, but the drive to go on, to stay here, to go uphill, and to open the doors in my heart and mind was waning.
It was times like these for which I was glad I had planned so well. Whatever the day held for me, I had something scheduled to which I could keep, though I could adapt as needed. And yet there was one portion of the adventure that was starting to weigh down on my mind, especially in vulnerable times: past August, there was only a blank space on my plan. I had thought that maybe I might go to Romania, Britain, or Ireland. But the fact that I had nothing to hold onto past that point left me uneasy. I chose not to think about it, though I knew the day of reckoning was coming.
I was deep in a sea of thoughts, and I would crawl out of it to the island of my train seat, observing the changing world outside my window. The old, yet clean, towns and railway stations became dilapidated and were choked with more and more graffiti and vines. Then I would leave these observances and I would go back to one thought: maybe I had hung too much on this trip. Had I made it everything? Was it an end unto itself? I had left my home and quit my job, and I had no plan after this thing. I began to ask myself why I was really there. Was I now just running away from having to find a career and settle down? I felt challenged by that thought, and I considered just leaving, flying home and asking my old company to take me back. I could just forget about this adventuring thing. I was sure they could find a place for me. But when I thought more on it, I knew I would never be happy in accounting. Even if I made a good wage, its rewards were not enough to pull me through the tough times that it, or any job, or life, would throw at me. What was it that had the power to draw me forward, not just in travel but in life?
It was here in my thoughts that I decided I would stay away from America for a full six months. I did not care if I ran out of money and had to sleep on the streets. There was no logic to it, but in my heart I felt like this was now a quest to find what had the power to draw me forward. I wanted to get more out of this than just some postcards and pictures. The train yanked itself into hlavní nádraží (“central station” in Czech), and I exited to Prague, no wiser, but more determined to stay the course of adventure.
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