When we were going along the Moselle river back in Germany, Nick and I spent a while talking back and forth in badly accented English of various flavors, complaining about how awful Americans are, and how badly Americans do everything. I played the Frenchman, saying stuff like, “Look at zese passenger trains. Zey are so much better than ze stupid American ones. Zey are on time, and zey don’t smell of piss and hotdogs.”
Nick came back with, “Yah, in Austria de trains have actual room, you know? You can put your feet up. But we don’t; ya? Because ve are not de tasteless savages like de Americans. In der flip-flops und baseball hats.”
Well, this morning we boarded our first French train, out of Luxembourg.
Crammed our piles of stuff onto the terribly designed French trains, and we’re on our way…
Crammed our piles of stuff onto the terribly designed French trains, and we’re on our way…
Nick managed to get about half an hour of napping, until a German man wandered into the train car talking loudly on his phone. The man paced the aisle and ranted, getting more and more upset, then disconnected the call and left through the sliding door with a murderous expression.
It’s so gauche to complain on vacation. But from a bike tourist perspective, I do have a few minor complaints to air about the French trains. For one, they sold me tickets with a six-minute transfer time, to get between two trains that arrived at opposite ends of a massive station, and our train pulled in late. Even without two loaded bicycles, we would have needed to move at a dead run, threading through crowds.
When we missed that connection, the ticket counter attendant said that missing the train was “our fault” and that the best they could do was put %15 of the ticket price towards later tickets. So I had to pay another $140 for failing to get across the platform at unsafe speed.
(The elevators were so small we had to stand the bikes vertically and go one at a time. The elevators were also very slow. This is a concern mostly for bicycle tourists like us, but also, woe betide you if you’re in a wheelchair and the person pushing it isn’t willing to sit on your lap for the ride to the platform.)
When I asked them which platform the next train would arrive on so I could be prepared, they said they did not know, and had no way of knowing until 20 minutes before the train was due to depart. Not when it arrived … when it departed.
When that time comes due, they start flashing the name and platform of the train on the big electronic signs, including the one in the lobby. At that moment, several hundred people suddenly stand up and begin shoving themselves and their luggage down the hall. The only reason I can think of for doing it this way is so people waiting for a train don’t wait “too close” to the designated platform and interfere with people catching trains before them. … But if they knew the time and platform in advance, with enough confidence that they could time their walk to the platform, most people wouldn’t do that. They’d sit in the waiting area where there are comfortable benches.
The train was ten minutes late, cutting ten minutes off the time it would linger before departure. Nick and I had to wait with our loaded bikes in the main hall, staring at the departure screen, waiting for it to update and show the platform, so we could dash for the correct elevators and ride them up.
When we got to the train we had to run the bikes to the far end of it, to a car with no external labeling indicating it conveyed bikes. The bike area inside was up two steps, around a sharp bend, behind a completely useless sliding door that kept closing on the bikes as we were moving them … and then up two more steps. And again, at the same time, if you’re in a wheelchair or not entirely able in some other way, the French train system says, screw you.
Traveling on the Belgian trains was alright; traveling on the German trains was a pleasure. The French train system is a dumpster fire. Not the trains; the train system. Even the lowly American train stations back home – and the subways, and the bus terminals – can tell you what platform each one will be arriving at, with near-realtime accuracy.
Aaaaanyway…
When Nick and I emerged from the train station with our bikes, we were in Paris, and it was instant chaos. We dropped into the nearest bike lane and zig-zagged through city streets, tumbling in the chaos of cars and people and bikes and scooters all fighting for gaps. It was pretty intense, after polite Luxembourg. Nick performed quite well in it, saying “my rides in Oakland prepared me for this.” We got lots of interested looks and comments from even the jaded Parisians about the bikes we were riding.
This is the face you make when you’ve survived your first ride through Paris bicycle lanes.
We had to pass through two security gates and open an apartment door that was built stronger than the door to any other apartment I’d ever stayed in. It was like entering a vault. We pulled the bags off both bikes to fit them through doorway.
I settled in with the computer, working mostly on photos, and Nick laid down for a few minutes. Then we got up and went searching for food.
We passed several restaurants and cafes, jam-packed with talking people, almost all of them smoking with one hand and drinking with the other. The noise of conversation even outdoors was jarring.
We arrived at a little cafe I’d picked randomly on the map, and the head waiter took our orders. He debated with his companion, who was from Argentina, what the definition of “Argentina spiciness” was, but couldn’t find an English translation. We rolled the dice.
First French meal, at a restaurant a few blocks away.
The meal was tasty but not quite filling. I suggested that we get right up and go looking for another, and Nick readily agreed.
He led the way, picking streets at random. I vetoed a couple of spots that looked too expensive or too boring. We eventually wandered into a restaurant facing an extremely busy traffic loop running around a square, and went inside because it was a little bit chilly in our cycling clothes. The big windows gave an easy view of all the passing cyclists, and I schemed about coming back some later day with the camera to make an anonymous gallery of them.
I ordered a bolognese and ate about half of it. It was very heavy. Nick ordered honey-glazed salmon which was cooked perfectly, and I stole some.
After that we went walking again, generally in the direction of the apartment.
Inside, Nick laid down for a while again, then got up and exploded his luggage and re-configured it into a smaller version, using one of my stripped-down bike bags as a carry-on for the plane flight he was going to be taking soon.
We were both up until about 2:00am, with him organizing luggage and me sorting photos. There were a lot of them to sort… About 1500.
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 box for Luxembourg off of my bucket list.
Sorry, bankers and fortifications, you’re just not cool enough!
First time I’ve seen an issue of this magazine in person. It’s a bit like The Santa Cruz Comic News back home, or at least, how it used to be before it was defunded.
First time I’ve seen an issue of this magazine in person. It’s a bit like The Santa Cruz Comic News back home, or at least, how it used to be before it was defunded.
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.
Minding the bikes as we speed alongside the waterway.
A lot of history in this gateway. It used to be part of a much larger wall.
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.
It’s everyone’s favorite, Minsky Mouse, plus Drungald and Ghoulfy!
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.
I especially like the choice of colors here. So decadent. Almost a tangerine dream, if you will…
Nick showing off the touring setup to a curious bystander.
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.
It’s a curious bystander with very limited English, and a Nick with very limited German!
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.
The hotel across the way just finished putting out the literal red carpet.
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.
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:
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.
Wandered around a corner and came upon this. It’s awesome.
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.
Lots of work has been done over the years to stabilize these cliffs.
Everybody knows it’ll take the wall apart eventually, but it’s so scenic!
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.
I recognize Oscar Wilde, but not the rest. I suck at this.
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.
I’m the fox… No I’m the fox! No I’m, no I’m, no I’m the fox!
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.
