Saturday, August 5, 2017

Welcome to Our Travel Stories

Mosel Camino Sign
In the summer of 2017, Mr. Mouse and had the great fortune to go on pilgrimage along the Mosel Camino for a week. We've prepared this set of stories and pictures together to share - who knows, maybe you'll feel inspired to hike at least a small part of the Camino yourself.

The Mosel Camino is a branch of the medieval St. James Pilgrimage Trail (or "Camino Santiago" in Spanish) than ends in the Gallician city of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. During the Middle Ages, the Camino had branches throughout Europe, and the Mosel Camino is a section that led from Koblenz to Trier through the Mosel River region of Germany.

In the picture at the top of this page, you can see the trail marker that is now used for the Mosel Camino, a scallop shell. The rays of the scallop point backwards, in the direction you've come, and the flat part points forwards, towards your destination. The scallop is the symbol of the Camino, and many hikers (including ourselves) wear a shell on their backpack or a small metal scallop on their hat.

Pilgrimage slows you down. Hiking between 17 and 24 km a day, with an elevation traversal, up and down, of up to 2500 feet a day, was not super strenuous. But it wasn't the same as doing the trip by car, or even by bike. "Der Weg ist das Ziel" -- the path is the goal -- is the motto of the pilgrim. It's not about getting somewhere but about being where you are - and getting somewhere as part of the process. If things go wrong, they don't really go wrong - after all, you are still on your way. If things go well - all the better!

Even in the old days there were two types of pilgrims:
  • Some pilgrims were deeply religious. They went on pilgrimage to have their sins forgiven, or to fulfill a vow. They went to churches, they prayed, they said confession to a priest periodically along the trail, and, in the end, they received an indulgence letter forgiving them of all their mortal sins so that they could enter heaven after they died.  
  • Other pilgrims were just as interested in the adventure. During the Middle Ages, people rarely left their village. Pilgrimage was a way to remove yourself from the day-to-day. It was a chance for introspection, for being in a different context, for learning something new, and, at the same time, seeing some beautiful scenery. 
You can still do the first type of Camino pilgrimage - get your pilgrim's book stamped in every town, and get a letter at the destination (I think you also have to be Catholic, but I'm not sure).

However, we were very much the second type of pilgrim. We were touched by the chapels, the holy places, the Stations of the Cross and we'll have photos. But our pilgrimage was a path to meet ourselves, to try something new. 

So, let the journey begin!


Koblenz - And Some Camino Info

Festung Ehrenbreitstein in Koblenz

We started our pilgrimage in early July, and our plan was to hike for 7 days. To make the trip more comfortable, we arranged the hike with Pura, a German travel agency that specializes -- among other things -- in arranging pilgrimages on the Camino. We had used the same agency when we did a pilgrimage on the Camino del Norte, the northern branch of the Camino Santiago in Spain, in 2007, so we knew they did an excellent job of trip planning. 

The agency booked our hotels, sent us maps and a guide book, arranged for luggage transfer by taxi between hotels. Our booking also included a lift to the trailhead on a day that would have been much too long if we hadn't had a ride. It was really the best of both worlds - we could pick our travel dates, but we had the advantage of the expertise of an agency who'd planned trips for pilgrims for a long time. We even had a number to call in case of dire emergency - but  we fortunately didn't need it. 

After our arrival by train at Koblenz train station we walked a short distance to the hotel. The woman at the reception was especially gracious - she had done a shorter pilgrimage the year before and enjoyed chatting with us about her trip and ours. We left our luggage and bought tickets to the Seilbahn Koblenz, a cable car that takes you to the other side of the Rhine, with amazing views of the Rhine and the Mosel rivers. 


Koblenz is famous for being the place where the Deutsche Eck is located, "where Father Rhine and Mother Mosel meet". The cable car runs from the city to the top of a ridge on the east side of the Rhine. On top of the ridge where the cable car ends is the Festung Ehrenbreitstein, a very large fortress that hosts several museums. Also enjoyable were the plantings in the Festung and, indeed, everywhere in Koblenz:


Koblenz hosted the Bundesgartenschau (Federal Horticultural Show) in 2011, and afterwards a volunteer organization formed, the Friends of the Bundesgartenschau, trying to keep up the beautiful plantings:


As a committed gardener, I couldn't help myself but had to take a photo or three...:


Then we retired to the hotel, where Mr. Mouse did some additional research on the next day's route:


As you can see, the hotel was a lovely place, a little older but very clean, with white paint and light furniture, a nice contrast to the old-fashioned chandelier. Each hotel on the trail was different. Our accommodations were perhaps a little soft for a pilgrimage - a comfortable bed, a private bath, and a very excellent breakfast! Many pilgrims take the option of staying in the pilgrimage hostels, for a minimal charge, though not every village has one available. Since the Mosel is really set up for tourists, we had lots of company, wine tourists, mainly, but the hotels took the odd pilgrim. So we enjoyed fabulous food and really good hotels. Below a view of the breakfast room in our hotel in Koblenz- notice the pretty flowers on each table:

Breakfast Room in Koblenz

After breakfast, the suitcase was packed and waiting for pickup. We picked up our a day pack and a small string pack containing water, food, blister plaster, raingear, and money for the bus to take us to the trailhead. 

Koblenz Stolzenfels to Alken and Löf

Mr. Mouse at Schloss Stolzenfels (Stolzenfels Castle). Note the scallop shell hanging off the pack on the left.
After a delicious breakfast buffet and a large amount of coffee for Mr. Mouse, we set out to the nearby bus top for the 1/2 hour ride to Koblenz Stolzenfels. From there, we found the starting point for the hike: a fairly steep road up from the Rhine to Schloss Stolzenfels (Stolzenfels Castle) on top of the ridge.

The distance that day was 20 km., with 500 m. elevation gain. It was one of the easier days, pleasantly cool and the elevation gain was spread through the day.


We were delighted to find that the signs for the Camino were abundant - in fact, we found signs for the Mosel Camino (yellow shell on blue) and the Left-Rhine Camino (yellow comet on blue). The Left-Rhine Camino (link in German) starts in Bingen and joins the Mosel Camino near Stolzenfels. Bingen is the town where Hildegard of Bingen founded a monastery, composed her beautiful music and wrote her plays during the 11th and early part of the 12th century,


The Mosel Camino signage was finished only in 2006 but, really, nobody can know how the pilgrims of old walked from Koblenz to Trier on their way to Santiago de Compostela. It's safe to assume that the pilgrims usually spent the nights along the river in a village or small town just like we did, and the Mosel Camino makes that easy to do. In fact, it's often possible to be in a town for a nice lunch as well.

Hiking in America is completely different. There is an expectation that you will camp if you go overnight, carrying your own tent, sleeping bag, small camp stove, and food, and cooking your own meals. So in America, hiking is more about experiencing wilderness. In Europe, its more about being outdoors and moving through the world, both the civilized part and the part where animals make their homes, as people have done for thousands of years, namely on foot.

Fledermaus Sommer-Quartier (Bat Summer Lodging)
We appreciated the many wildlife-friendly signs as we continued on our hike - bat houses, bird houses, and large wild bee houses.

Mosel Camino Bird House
More importantly, the bird houses were placed at an appropriate height and seemed safe for the songbirds that might use them as their homes. Forests in Germany are for the most part "Nutzwald" - they are grown for the wood, and have been for centuries. There are almost no places in Germany that haven't seen use by people over the roughly two millennia of civilized settlement. Many forests are owned by private owners, former noblemen, or the government. A "Förster", a trained forestry professional, oversees the forests and is in charge of hunting permits, logging, reforesting, and so on. Or at least that's how it used to be when I was a kid and one of my parents' best friends was a Förster.

The downside to a Nutzwald is that the trees don't get old, and don't have time to get the nesting holes for the birds. That means the bird houses are probably welcomed by the birds - and I don't think they mind the signs.

Forest Path
 Even on the first day, when the temperature only reached the high 70s, we appreciated hiking in the shade. We were glad about having enough water, and tried to fill our water bottles twice a day, once in the morning and once at lunch, to make sure we stayed hydrated. And we enjoyed the first snack of raspberries, which were just getting ripe:

Picking raspberries
Toward the end of the day, we walked past the small pilgrimage church Bleidenberg (link in German), which had a pleasant place for a rest before the last downhill of the day.


From there came a steep downhill past a set of Stations of the Cross sculptures. I was very glad to have packed my collapsible hiking poles - I didn't use them much, but they saved me from an undignified descent on all fours in a few cases. The soil along the Mosel is often slate or sand, so it was important to be careful.


Many of the small chapels, churches and other religious areas have Stations of the Cross walks along the way. These are sculptural representations of small vignettes from the story of Jesus' crucifixion taken from the Gospels. In area around where I grew up, in Unterfranken I don't remember any publicly accessible Stations of the Cross (most Catholic churches have them on the interior walls) probably due to the influence of the Reformation and subsequent civic unrest during the Thirty Years War.

In the area of the Rheinland along the Mosel Camino, the few communities that converted to Protestantism were forced to convert back to Catholicism after the first battles of the Thirty Years War which the Catholics won. Franconia, in contrast, was a patchwork quilt of Catholic and Protestant villages. So public displays, which were a common part of Catholic religious practice during the Middle Ages and of which outdoor Stations of the Cross are one, fell out of use in Unterfranken during the century between the mid 1500s to mid 1600s, due to the high probability that they would trigger confrontations between Catholic and Protestant villagers, whereas they continued in the Rheinland.

Other religious sculptures were in evidence everywhere. Small shrines with the Virgin Mary might be embedded in an old gate, like the one above.


What's puzzling is that today the churches in Germany are quite empty, but I sensed an undertone of the old faith along the Camino. Rheinland-Pfalz is pretty much completely Catholic, and something of those centuries of living with a faith can still be felt. Much more subtle than some of the in-your-face Christianity one can encounter in the US. A private affair between people and God, or Mary.

After the descent we first arrived back at the river in Alken and rewarded ourselves with a stop at an ice cream shop. Most ice cream shops in Germany have a collection of ice specialties, like ice cream sundays in the US but more elaborate. Mr. Mouse had Spaghettieis, a specialty that looks like a plate of spaghetti including the tomato sauce (crushed strawberries) and parmesan cheese (ground coconut), and I had an Eissplittertorte, specialty of the cafe where we stopped. The picture below is a screen shot of Spaghettieis from the Internet. Mr. Mouse ordered his Spaghettieis with chocolate ice cream, which made it look more like whole wheat pasta.


We still had a few kilometers to our hotel in Löf on the other side of the river. But no matter. We now had the confidence that we could do this (probably) and it was a nice afternoon to walk.

Our hotel was big, and filled with vacationers. Many were riding bikes - often e-bikes - along the Mosel to burn off at least some of the calories they would later consume in form of an excellent meal. After the daily shower drill - wash socks, wash T-shirt - we put on clean clothes from our suitcase which arrived at the hotel almost the same time we did. And a little later we were fortunate to have our brother-in-law meet us at the hotel. We spent a very pleasant evening sitting outside, catching up on the family news, looking at the Mosel, and eating an excellent meal. Then we read a bit, but the day on the trail had made us tired and we were asleep before 10.