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.
Before I visited or even did any research on Germany, I added it to my map of the gaps. This is what was in my head about the country, from pop culture or hearsay or dimly remembered school. (Of course, actually going there will change this a lot.)
Most of my knowledge about Germany is in the context of Word War II. Persecution of Jews, Third Reich, et cetera. A war machine of barbed wire and mud and gasoline, fueled by an angry eugenics ideology that was a response to the crushing reparations being paid by one generation of Germans for the sins of the previous generations in World War I. That stuff is pretty bleak.
Then there’s this more modern view, where Germany is a clean, friendly place of rolling green hills and rugged mountains, where people are surprisingly nerdy about scientific research, alternative energies, outdoor adventure, and funky electronic music, and war has moved from the physical world to the less visceral world of finance. I imagine modern Germans spend half their time wearing white-collar work clothes in shiny university buildings, and the other half in hiking boots and cute little shorts, tromping around in alpine fields and making extremely sarcastic jokes to each other. I see their sense of humor as sharp, and their demeanor as friendly but emotionally aloof. A competitive nature?
Pop culture tells me they drink a lot of beer and eat a lot of sausage, but I can’t quite imagine them doing it. Pop culture also tells me they are into edgy sexual stuff, but I’ve seen German porn, and frankly it’s tame. There is one major difference though: All the women, and even many of the men, in German porn are actually smiling. In American porn everybody has an absurd game-face on that makes them look like they’re either cleaning up an unpleasant spill, or asleep and snoring with their mouth open. Oh dear, how did I get on this topic? Let’s stop.
I have a lot of German ancestry on my father’s side, which is probably why most Germans look vaguely familiar to me, and I’m fascinated by the preserved “Brick Gothic” architecture in cities like Lübeck and the way it reminds me of childhood fairy-tales, but even so, Germany doesn’t quite feel like a “homeland” for me, the way I feel about Denmark, eastern Russia, and bits of Ireland.
Germany according to Where In Europe Is Carmen Sandiego
