Along German rivers with Nick 2023

The Moselle meets the Rhine

A pretty bad night according to my fancy watch. My sleep apnea mouth insert was not working right. Bah!

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.

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!

Nick packed up, and on we went.

We found a bakery groovy bakery in the next town, and sat down to a solid breakfast.

Just as we were starting to chomp, Nick realized he’d forgotten his battery back at the campsite, so I spent some time at looking at train schedules and moving photos around.

After that we rode along the riverbank, absorbing the pleasant air and sun.

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, 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.

Nearby was a pedestal with a section-by-section breakdown:

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.

Tourists, musicians, and locals wandered around.

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.

As we were readying the bikes, I noticed a few tiny bricks set into the street.

On closer inspection I got a chilling reminder of what had happened here before, and during, World War II.

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.

It felt like a privilege to be here, during a narrow slice of history where things are relatively peaceful.

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.

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.