Along German rivers with Nick 2023 Page 2

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.

Marx and some bourgeoisie statuary

We were still behind schedule, so today would be another round of train travel. Our first stop was the city of Trier, about 90km (60 miles) farther up the Moselle river. It’s potentially Germany’s oldest city, having been established by Romans in the first century BC, and that means even more than the usual number of artful monuments preserved in an arrested state of decay, to stand next to and make blog posts about.

Nick’s first observation upon arriving: “Smells like cigarettes.”

One of the things I was keen to see was the “Black Gate” (and not just because of a beloved old computer game called “Ultima 7: The Black Gate”).

Back when the Romans built it, it was part of a series of walls and gates to protect the city and regulate commerce, and in the 2000-or-so intervening years it was nearly torn down, then left as a ruin for a while, then repurposed into a pair of churches, before finally being “restored” more-or-less to the form the Romans had planned. There is of course no need for a giant gate to regulate commerce, nor any point to having a giant wall (in this age of missiles, long-range artillery, and flight) so it now stands as a tribute to the deep history of the city and the passing of ages. And for Nick and I to stand in front of while taking photos, of course.

Another thing we came across in our wandering was a big statue of Karl Marx. No surprise because Karl was born here in Trier, in 1818.

Indeed, it’s possible to take a tour of the very house he was born in, which has been turned into a sparse but engaging museum you can walk through. The entrance fee was small, so Nick and I checked it out.

After that we wandered a while in search of snacks. We passed a portable fairground, and were amused by the deliberately off-kilter cartoon characters.

From this amusing bit of “low culture” we wandered into an area of “high culture”:

The Palace Garden, designed in the style of a French garden of the 18th century, with a deliberate mix of perfectly maintained vegetation and worn-looking statuary.

The official website for the garden gives the following handy breakdown, for reasons I cannot understand:

Water: 30%
Baroque: 60%
Greenery: 70%

The various statues represent a gallery of old gods and notable mortals. See if you can recognize Zeus, Poseidon, Demeter, Ares, Kronos, et cetera:

While Nick was wandering, he fell into conversation with another patron of the arts:

I watched from a distance while he tried his quickly improving German and his new friend filled the gaps with English. Eventually they went from bicycles to travel to looking up nearby points of interest on the phone.

Alas, we were on a time limit, with a hotel room booked in Luxembourg at the end of another train ride, and the train was leaving soon. The most we could do was meander back to the station.

The train didn’t have a designated bike car, but it had some all-purpose areas with no seats. We shoved the bikes into one of them and they bobbed merrily with the rolling of the tracks. It was a quiet ride. In a while the train drifted away from the river, which felt strange after so many days of following one.

The arrival in Luxembourg was grand. The central city is built on a massive hill that appears to have been cut long ago by the changing course of a river, and has since been layered and re-layered with fortifications, more recently layered with modern train tracks and paved roads.

To my eye, the most amazing part was the Bock, a wedge of rock and ancient stones and modern concrete, spearing out from the hillside towards the east. In ancient days it had been a Roman site, then the property of a nearby Abbey, then a fortress, and then finally in the last couple of hundred years the fortress was demolished and the remaining material reinforced so a paved road could be built right along the top of it, leading into the city.

What’s truly impressive is that the reconstruction was done to preserve some evidence of the previous roles played by the Bock, and you can go strolling out onto it and look around. I decided that’s what I would do.

But first, we needed to check in at the hotel. I’d managed to get a good deal on a room overlooking the central square, a.k.a. the Place Guillaume II, but only by booking it long in advance. That deadline was part of the reason we’d been pressed for time in earlier weeks, which was irritating but unavoidable.

Attendants were just beginning to set up a fancy welcoming ceremony for some more important people, at the Hôtel de Ville across the square. Maybe some dignitaries bound for the city hall on the west side.

Meanwhile, Nick and I went in search of snacks!

After that it was time to wander. We split up, and I took my bike (much lighter with all the touring gear unpacked) and went squiggling east towards the Bock. Along the way I met the Grand Duchess Charlotte:

I also encountered this charming little tree, turned into a community art project:

Here’s one of my favorite encounters: The Hämmelsmarsch statue, constructed in 1982 by local artist Wil Lofy. On top of being masterfully done, it’s also totally adorable.

I love the vertical surfaces. I grew up in a house on a hillside, and now I spend a lot of my time near San Francisco where houses are stacked in layers, and I feel a very particular sense of joy when I’m looking at architecture and nature wrapped over and under itself and I have to untangle the scene in my mind.

There was so much to see in this city it was completely overwhelming, and a bit painful because we only had about a day to check it out. It seemed like every street corner and windowsill had a history, which is arguably true of any urban place more than a couple hundred years old but felt especially true here.

Take the Monument of the Millennium, for example, which I wandered past. The government had intended to celebrate the 1000-year anniversary of the city with a monument, and while excavating for its construction, had discovered ancient ruins that compelled them to stop building the monument and focus on the ruins instead.

The light refined as the day moved on. I moved back towards the city center, still trying to cram the detail into my eyes.

Eventually it was time to meet Nick for dinner. We wandered the nearby square, inspecting menus for something that looked good but didn’t cost a fortune, and found something that was good and merely very expensive. We talked about what we’d seen, focusing mostly on the urban planning, and looking things up on our phones for reference.

After that we spent a little time wandering together, taking more photos.

And dangit, that was all the time we had.

Lingering in Luxembourg

It would have been lovely to linger in Luxembourg, swanning around one of Europe’s most expensive cities among the bankers, business tycoons, and real estate moguls, pretending that we had more money than we did and could just sit perpetually, enjoying the view from behind the obsolete but gorgeous fortifications.

But instead, we were going to do something even cooler: Board a train to Paris, one of Europe’s largest and most culturally dynamic (and also, yes, most expensive) cities. Our time was limited, and frankly it was better to be spending it in Paris now that I had checked the Luxembourg box on my bucket list.

Sorry, bankers and fortifications, you’re just not cool enough!