Cochem is Cool

It was a decent amount of sleep, according to my watch and me general sense of well-being. Time for more adventure!

I was glad I’d left the flap partway open so it wasn’t roasting inside.  The humidity down near the river in this valley is intense.

I rolled up the tent and got my bike reassembled.  Nick took much longer, and I helped him deflate and fold the tent.  He had an aversion to using the net bags that hung under the panniers, so he stuffed most of his things into the panniers below the seat, making them look like they’d explode any second. It’s true, those net bags look precarious, like they could fall or be torn off, but so far in my years of riding that’s never happened…

We backtracked to the footbridge over the railway, then down it again and turned left, onto the same road we’d left the previous night.  More beautiful terraced fields on the right, more of the shining Moselle on the left.  I sent Nick a link to a train station about five miles down the road.  We would aim for that as an easy first target, and if we had plenty of time left over we’d keep going and see how close we could get to Cochem and the nifty castle there.

On the way we passed a couple of kids walking along the path.  I recognized them as the ones I’d seen yesterday.  Looks like they’d had a playdate at one house and were now walking over to the other, or something.  I passed them close and said “O HAI!”.  The loudmouth kid replied “Ohayō!”, so I shouted back “Ohayō Gozaimasu!”

Nick was a few seconds behind me, and when he passed, the kid muttered “Sus among us…” prompting Nick to shout “DAMMIT!”

That got a huge laugh from me.  I knew that kid would say something sassy; I just didn’t know what. Nick was frustrated because he didn’t have a witty retort he could fire back before he sped out of range.

That was all very amusing but the real feature of the day was the scenery: Terraced hillsides, threaded with ramps and stairways and hardware, lined with crops, all breathing the smell of growth into the lush air of the river valley, and glowing beneath a crisp late-spring sky.

I’m not much of a wine drinker, but I could understand why this region was world-famous.

At one point I jarred to a stop because I was required to take this photo looking across the river. It was mandatory.

A photo opportunity like that rolls up to you, and you have no choice.

And then, your nephew suggests a coffee stop, and that too becomes mandatory!

On the approach to Cochem we saw more castles, more slowly subsiding brick, more evidence of new and old culture entangled in fun ways.

It clearly took a lot of money to maintain this area, keeping it passable to traffic, keeping the buildings in a distinguished but usable state.

The sky went cloudy and started throwing water on us, but we didn’t mind.

Finally we rolled into Cochem. It turned out to be a much more built-up city than the ones we’d passed since joining the Moselle. The streets were busy with tourists, pouring in and out of shops, rubbernecking at the buildings, and hunkered down at cafe tables. The ongoing rain had pushed most of them indoors but plenty were still roaming.

We rode the bikes up the hillside into a few zig-zagging streets and stopped at a square that claimed to have an open cafe.  The waitress was cleaning off the tables and shoving them closer together beneath the umbrellas, since the rain was intensifying. “Sorry,” she said in perfect American-accented English, “we close in just a few minutes so we can’t make you and food.”

We looked at the other cafes in the square and I randomly picked one that had a nice chocolate tart sitting in the display case behind the window. We claimed seats within view of the bikes. We ordered food but before it arrived Nick had to excuse himself to find the “WC”, and when he came back he said there had been a “poop explosion”.  Different bacteria here wreaking havoc I presume?  I was a kind of surprised I wasn’t suffering the same fate…

We looked at maps and schedules, then hotel listings.  Hotels in this town were still available, and they were relatively cheap.  We could snag a decent-looking room for under a hundred bucks.  If we did that, we could heap the bags into the room and go poking around Cochem for the rest of the day and some of the morning as well, then hop on the train to Trier.  It would mean not spending the night in Trier the next day, but the trade felt worth it.  There so much to photograph in this town!

I reserved the hotel room, and Nick and I chatted about generational differences, and how much American cultural detritus we saw in the young people around us, tourists and locals alike.  We both agreed that if nephew Dane was here with us, he would quickly become a celebrity because of the way he spoke, the clothes he wore, and his height.  The locals wouldn’t have a chance.

After a fine snack, we went poking around with cameras. This town was lush with detail.

We loved the closeness of the buildings and the amount of carved wood.

We rolled over to the hotel and I checked us in.  Then we rolled around to a side entrance and began pulling the bags off the bikes and running them upstairs through a card-access door.  The room was oddly shaped but comfortable.

Nick locked his bike nearby, and we went wanding in opposite directions.

First thing I encountered was another unfortunate street marker…

The rain had stopped and the sun was out from behind the clouds, and still above the tree-line.  The wet surfaces around us made for great photography. As I moved uphill through the streets, I got a good view of the castle. Amazing!

Nick traced my location and caught up with me.

We spotted a cemetery on the map and found it, then walked around taking many photos. Nick settled down on a bench and recorded some ambient birdsong.

While that was happening I wandered down a twisty staircase, toting the bicycle and listening to ambient music. 

Near the base of the hill I found another cafe, and Nick joined me about 20 minutes later in time to order a meal.

We each got another one of those rhubarb drinks from yesterday.  He went with a fishy pasta dish and I got a burger.  More discussion, this time about language barriers in the young versus the old, and the difficulty of learning new languages.