hi time (2 hit the road)

 high time for a new update on the current situation, being minimal... (do not see me theatre at its best)

- but also plans to move again (been a while with Covid and all that)

 

re-kindled the traditional 'triangulation drives' but decided to split into two parts

part one - south (second part in various guises, soon, see below)

we thought it good to rekindle this combination of research & visiting, and due to circumstances, opted for two separate trajectories – the first being south along routes we already know and have described elsewhere, with the exception of Heilbronn, which I never saw before – so every time there is something different to consider along the way... 

 

First leg south decided to do in two days – take some time at stations we usually just whizz past (fahn fahn fahn auf der autobahn) – taking the A4 direction Cologne and then the 61 south, which is still closed in parts due to the damage cause by the raging torrents last year – weather getting weirder every year – now to hot. Bonn and the requisite grave visitation, and then along the Rhine – past Coblence then, where the hills get steeper and rockier towards the Lorelei – which I have seen from the express train Frankfurt-Cologne many a time, but never stopped to have a good look – and perhps I waited too long, since the romantic shores are now festooned with white plastic camper vans – so much for that romantic vista which Victor Hugo once illustrated; backdrop to a wagnerian scene of the Rheingold or such – hard to envisage nowadays – but anyway heading south towards the 'Binger Loch' which always intrigued me – but here too not as impressed as I might have been a few years back... something lacking – need of a new choreography perhaps. Short stop at Bingen before heading further south and into the hills behind the wine-route at Neustadt... the Palatine forests... here too a sense of loss: many trees dead or dying, climate change and budworm, no looking good at all. 

 

We spent the night at the cloister Esthal, where we had been before, and which each time boasts less nuns to run the place, now being held together/barely afloat with some help from the east (polish?) but also in need of a new concept – not just yoga classes and mindfulness – but who still wants to work at it? Lovely old orchards and fields going to seed, crumbling forest and growing graveyard... but still a wonderful place to stay compared with alternatives in that price-range...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meandering down the forest hills into the Rhine valley we had to adjust again to the frenzied speed-freaks hogging the Autobahn, just in time to get stuck in heavy traffic (well standstill in fact) at Karlsruhe. Where our old cafeteria on the river has been refurbished into a kitch-club and no longer an attractive pit-stop. Slow going, lots of roadworks gumming up our itinerary – deciding then to head straight for Munich rather than the Allgäu-route we had considered – backdrop scenery not really up to scratch anymore anyway... Munich on the other hand went well – used to be a major drama in various acts to get through – now a dark passage through new tunnels, but quicker – and so one might consider t-shirts with 'been to Munich, saw nothing' as novelty item...

 

Lucky for us the visit was at the foothills of the alps and therefore cool and green, as opposed to the burnt landscape we had left behind – so an idyll that still exists but for how long? 

 

defaced memorial to death-march victims

 anti septic Prüm water (holy) dispenser

and jesussandals:

 

We decided on a zig-zag return route, avoiding the roadworks we by now knew well, and taking what turned out to be quite a scenic route west and then north and then west again, to then head back into the palatine hills and cross over to Belgium through the Ardennes stopping a Prüm just before the border... seemingly one of the most important cloisters in it's day, now sort of forgotten along the way. Founded in 721 by Bertrada the elder, a great-grandmother of Charlemagne, it had immense power and territories it it's day and under Pippin III acquired Christ's sandals from the holy land, still on view today – though scholars consider them to be merovignian house-shoes (pantouffles) and never saw the holy grail... anyway, it was an interesting unscheduled find an I must say I liked a thought over one of the doorways:

“God give all those that know me

still tenfold more

of what they treat me...” (1775)

On that note we headed into the Belgian Haute Fagnes...

 

and then a major new investigation into territory unknown - east

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(more on that later too)

in the meantime a little ditty