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.
Notice the teeth on the underside of the rail so machines can ratchet their way up the slope.
One of the many wacky contraptions used to move things about on the hillside.
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.
That’s where we gotta go to get to the snack shop. Awesome!
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.
It looks like someone stuck it there with a nail right through the chest…
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.
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!
Wood doesn’t last forever when exposed to the elements…
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.
The history of the town, told in collage. It goes way, way back.
I packed up my stuff relatively quickly, though I had to unroll the tent again because I accidentally wrapped my headphones and GPS tracker inside it. Nick had commandeered one of my folding chairs and was browsing memes while slowly waking up. He looked so comfortable I decided I would leave him be and go take a shower.
Oh boy, shower time… Looks a bit grody… Here we go.
I wheeled the bike over to the restaurant just in case, but it was closed. The shower was alarmingly grody, so I changed out of my clothes while standing in my biking sandals and showered with them on. Still way better than no shower at all!
Not bad for an all-you-can-eat ten dollar breakfast.
Just as we were starting to chomp, Nick realized he’d forgotten his battery back at the campsite, so I spent some time browsing train schedules and moving photos around.
Kind of a lot of pollen and fluff in the air, but the weather is perfect.
A few hours later we stopped for drinks at a roadside restaurant, just because we could. I got hot chocolate and he got a coffee drink.
We talked a lot about urban planning, about the paranoia his parents had about strangers and getting lost that was imposed on them by the suburban life, about how different it was when I was a kid. We tried to think of ways we could adapt urban environments, so they were better for families, and turned people away from the madness of car-based environments.
We pedaled on, drifting apart and then back again. Soon we threaded into Koblenz, a large town sitting at the juncture of the Moselle and Rhine rivers, and stopped in a plaza. There we found a tall monument depicting the history of the region.
Contemplating such a massive span of time, and scraps of earlier conversations, Nick sat down to work through some things in his head. I walked around and gazed at the people and ate a snack.
From there we squiggled a bit farther north and found some other interesting sculpture, eventually reaching a park right at the confluence of the rivers, with an enormous statue of Kaiser Wilhelm overlooking the slowly churning water.
It was a nice day for lingering, but we did have more ground to cover. We rode west, following the Moselle. Going was very, very slightly tougher because now we were headed upriver instead of down.
We stopped at a greek cafe up a hill, next to a train station. I got gyros and wolfed them down, and Nick got some tortellini which he ate at a more sensible pace. I planned a train ride for tomorrow to make up for lost time.
How do you make amends, as a government or a nation, for an act of murder that was so complete that there is no family, even extended family, left to return stolen property to? When they’re dead, and the people who killed them are dead, and the officials and the lawmakers who were “just following orders” are dead by firing squad or rotting in prison, and your bombed-out, ruined country is now one enormous crime scene, how do you set it right?
I don’t know. These little bricks are obviously no compensation. I’ve done a fair amount of reading about what happened on the path to World War II and how it played out, but not much on what the Germans did afterward…
I made a note to do that, then dragged my mind back to the present, and the fine weather. The steep vineyards along the river were ridiculously pretty.
As I passed through a quiet intersection I heard a kid’s voice coming from a side yard. He said “Alahoo Akbar, reep reep, Alahoo Ahhkbarr,” and made a bunch of snorting noises like a pig. I was confused, then suddenly realized he was saying this at me, because he saw I was wearing a bandana, and decided that it must be some kind of keffiyeh under my bike helmet, and was mocking me with a religious phrase he connected to them.
I felt quite incredibly offended on behalf of everyone in the Middle East, and turned the bike around slowly, and rolled back by the yard. The kid who’d made the noises was still muttering nonsense to himself and kicking a soccer ball against the gate. I didn’t say anything, but grinned rather intensely at him, and when he saw me he jerked back, then stiffly gathered his ball and about-faced to walk to his friend at the far end of the yard. If I’d had more forethought I would have said something sarcastic to him in English. Hopefully I at least surprised some caution into the little shithead.
The incident was unsettling, and made me very thoughtful about the degree to which I was able to assume that the people around me in this foreign country meant me no harm. I mean, I’d known going in that I already looked very German, so as long as I didn’t open my mouth I could blend in; to the degree that a dude riding a recumbent festooned with too many bags could blend in anywhere. It honestly never occurred to me that they might also assume I was Middle Eastern because of my freaking bandana, which is, okay, an exceptionally thick white cotton cloth with an elaborate pattern on it in bright red ink, but generally smaller than any keffiyeh. Were Germans looking at me with some suspicion because of that? Was the shitty rambling of this little kid just an overt sign of an internal bigotry churning below the surface of the adult minds all around me?
I passed out of the town and down a steep hill, then zig-zagged to the campsite. The woman at the booth spoke broken English and was very friendly, though I also detected a strange note of nervousness in her demeanor, and I couldn’t help thinking it was the bandana again. It probably wasn’t. But the sense of discontent lingered with me.
I looked for Nick on my map and saw that he’d blown past the campsite. I called him and told him to read his texts, which he did. He turned right around. “Dang, I was just cruising along, feeling good. I could have gone a bunch more miles today I think.”
I ordered a giant glass of ice with tapwater in it, and they brought it to me, plus a refill. For that I was charged six dollars. Nick hemmed and hawed over the menu and eventually chose a rhubarb soda, which tasted a bit like a carbonated sports drink but came in a very nice tall glass.
We chatted about cultural differences, and the presence of so much designer label clothing around us. Nick pointed out that it was very expensive to get a drivers license in Germany. I opined that it was typical of Europe to make rules designed specifically to shut out the lower classes, as if they weren’t allowed to exist. I came to Germany expecting to find everything either the same as or better than the United States. Better land, better customs, better laws… Instead I’m finding that it’s a mixed bag, and some of the stuff they do seems outright crazy. I thought crazy was a mode that belonged only to Americans.
We found an open patch and set up our tents, then I bought more laundry tokens in the restaurant.
Two 7-minute showers and two washing machine runs.
We loaded laundry into two machines. Then we sat around organizing the campsite for a bit, then just reading our devices. One of the dryers ate two of my coins, so we consolidated.
By the time our laundry was done it was fully night, and we snuggled in, listening to the occasional bird calls from the swampy inlet on the far side of our little peninsula. It felt a bit like summer camp. Tomorrow we would wake up and go climbing around on ropes, and decorate pinecones to look like Mr. Potato Head, then have a sing-song around the fire.
For a while we drifted away from the river, into some low hills. The landscape reminded me of the nicest parts of river delta area, east of San Francisco back home. Vivid greens, dark fertile soil, and air that was just a touch humid without being overwhelming. Evidence of small-scale and industrial farming, and residential gardens, scrolled by on both sides of the path.
Local version of the moisture renention I see over crops back home.
“Any one of these cute townships could feel like home,” I thought, “just from the look of them, laid out across the slope of a hill ahead.”
Of course at the same time, another part of me was busily examining this feeling, and considering the ways that pop culture – like Disney films – and the stories told by my extended family combined to generate this feeling, even though I had never been here before and couldn’t even speak the local language.
The architecture was a combination of immediately familiar, based on my time visiting Berkeley as a kid and staying in my great grandmother’s Victorian house, with mythical, as I recognized the half-timbered style from illustrations in fairytale books and computer games, with the anonymously modern and undistinguished style I’ve seen everywhere from Los Angeles to London.
Nick was still ranging ahead of me, and we kept in touch over text, occasionally sending photos back and forth of whatever caught our eye. This was castle territory: The Rhine is absolutely crawling with castles, keeps, fortresses, et cetera.
Somewhere in the last couple of centuries the practice of cannibalizing stone from an old castle to build a new one ground to a halt as internal combustion made it far easier to refine and transport new building materials like concrete and steel – while simultaneously making these structures useless as defense – and nowadays they’re maintained for their aesthetics more than anything else. Which is fantastic, frankly. I would cycle down this river even without castles to look at, but they really kick it up a notch.
Many a feast has been chomped behind those windows!
Eventually I closed the gap with Nick, who was catching a truly amazing vibe down by the shore of the river at a small cafe, sipping a microscopic espresso. It looked so perfect that I was reluctant to disturb him: I got the feeling he was making a specific memory that would bounce around in his mind for years.
We also discussed the riding schedule. Our stretch goal was a campsite called “Campingpark Sonneneck”, about ten miles outside of Koblenz. We were making good time, and if we could get all the way it would give us more time to look around Koblenz before we turned west up the Moselle.
We rode near each other, then with me directly behind Nick to draft him, for the remaining miles. We talked about starting up an audiobook together, but were enjoying our music too much.
“Only narrowness can birth wideness. All else goes to the sea.” -F.G. Paff
I’m not sure what it means or whether I agree with it, but there you go.
Right down by the river we saw a lot of small plots of land with gardens and shack-like houses on them. We couldn’t decide on the purpose of these. Some appeared to be exclusively for gardening. Some were barely habitable, and didn’t appear to be insulated or electrified. Some looked lived-in. Were these properties used for vacationing? Was this considered some kind of low-income or government-assisted housing? We couldn’t figure it out.
If people wanted to build structures of this size, and in this location, in modern times, they would use different materials and a different design, and the result would probably need a whole lot less maintenance. But, am I glad these grand old buildings were retrofitted? Yes I am!
We pushed the pedals and chugged along, but it was fully dark when we arrived at the campsite. The attendant said the place was full, but if we wanted, we could set up in the space next to the cute little mini golf course. It wasn’t much room, and there might be some noise, but we counted ourselves lucky.
We rolled our bikes over to the site and I sent Nick out immediately to run to the pizza joint in the middle of the campground and ask if they could still make us food. Turns out they could, so we ordered two personal pizzas and glasses of orange juice. We chowed down with gusto. I wasn’t sure if we were being rude by picking up the slices directly rather than cutting them with a knife and fork, but I was too hungry to care.
Nick and I hauled the bikes downstairs and packed them, and this time we managed not to accidentally switch our smaller bags. I also did a quick inspection and found that my rack was missing a screw. This is why we bring spares…
Time to explore, with an appropriately themed t-shirt.
Time to explore, with an appropriately themed t-shirt.
Our first destination was one from yesterday: We cycled back to the Römerberg, the big square with all the amazing buildings. Our mission was to get a picture standing in the same spot that Nick’s grandfather, Ben, stood a quarter century ago.
Standing in the spot where dad did, about a quarter century ago.
With that photo done, we barged into a random restaurant for brunch. We pointed at stuff behind the counter and they loaded the items onto a dish, then charged us all at once. Service via the point-and-grunt method! My mother would be proud.
The coffee was terrible, but we devoured the food, chatting about New York versus German cities, about bikes versus cars, about different modes of dress.
“Germany skews much more older than America,” Nick observed. “Or perhaps those are the only people we see out in the middle of a Friday?”
We strolled around a bit, getting our last looks at the magnificent square.
Little houses in a little house shop, in a house that looks like the little houses!
Back on the bikes, we set out for another photo op, reproducing a shot from 1997 at the David and Goliath sculpture. This went a bit better. Here’s the original:
The David And Goliath fountain. Sitting where Dad sat about a quarter centurty ago.
There were some other photos we could try to reproduce but they were just on random street corners, so we declared victory and began to move west and south, picking streets almost randomly. Frankfurt was a busy place, and we encountered all kinds of goings-on, for example a trade union protest.
We crossed the Opelbrücke bridge using a bike lane, putting us on the south side of the river. The weather was great. The wind was against us but was very mild.
For several hours we stayed on the Eurovelo route. Nick expressed interest in the mapping program I was using, so we installed it on his phone. It allowed us to use (and cache) the OpenCycle map, upon which all the Eurovelo routes are marked. Now we would both know what was ahead.
The Eurovelo route was charming. It was clearly pieced together from other things: Connected bike paths, old walking trails, decommissioned rail lines, suburban streets … even chunks of parking lot.
Interesting! The USSR hammer and sickle. Symbols of communism turned into symbols of racism, thanks to Russia.
There was a snag: The campground did not accept any sort of charge card. It was cash only. I would need to find a cash machine in the morning. In the meantime, I agreed to leave my passport with the clerk overnight as a kind of collateral.
We didn’t know it at the time, but the city of Mainz was the birthplace of Johannes Gutenberg about 600 years ago. There was an amazing museum featuring early examples of mass-printed type, but it was already closed for the day.
I found an ATM, and then hung out for a while at a hip-looking and expensive cafe. I was surprised to see how many German people smoke, including young people. That would explain the cigarette machine I saw at the campsite. I haven’t seen one of those in 30 years (since they were banned.)
Back across the river I paused to grab a photo of the city, because the light was calling to me.
I crawled into my tent and tried to inflate the mattress, but the pump was nearly dead and would barely move air. I sent Nick a snippy text about it. Then I scooped together a bunch of gadgets and crawled back out, and found a power outlet in the bathroom building. Since I had time to kill I trimmed my beard, then sat reading. An hour later everything was decently charged. Now I could have a nice mattress!
There was a pub next to the campground and a bunch of revelers were laughing and shouting in German until late in the night. I put in my Airpods and was able to mostly ignore it.
Very often I question the sheer amount of stuff I haul around in bike bags while touring. But on days like this it feels okay.
