German week…

One week to cross Germany. It’s not that the country is ugly, but between the floods in the south and the general ban on staying anywhere other than a motorhome parking lot, the truth is that we really want to get to Denmark soon!… 🙂

We had been complaining about the rain for days… Well, it turns out that we were somewhat right! We entered Germany just to receive alerts on our phones from the National Weather Service for prolonged heavy rain and storms throughout the weekend. Result: the entire south of the country flooded, and a few more kilometres for us to avoid flooded roads or overflowing rivers… But well, a little further north, the situation had already returned to normal…

Umleitung (3/06/2024)

Neither of us speaks German, but during these first three days in Germany, there is one word that we learned very quickly: Umleitung (detour). As we approached the town of Lichtenstein (the town, not the country…), the yellow “Umleitung” signs multiplied, forcing us to follow increasingly longer detours. At first we thought they were roads closed due to construction works, and then we passed by a river, and we understood it all… A quick look at Google Maps and, sure enough, we were in one of the regions that suffered heavy flooding that weekend (for those who didn’t see the news, you’re still on time, on Replay… 😉). For us, all ended up with just a few extra kilometres and a night on the edge of a small rural road transformed, for the occasion, into one of the only ways to reach Switzerland from this part in the country (and vice versa)… Enough to say that the night wasn’t exactly very quiet. But for the locals, the floods forced hundreds of people to evacuate, a landslide derailed a train (with no casualties, fortunately) and, sadly, a firefighter lost his life in another town…

After visiting the castles of Hohenzollen and Lichtenstein (in a fog, as can be seen in the photos… 🧐), we went a little further north to get out of the flooded area. Our day ended with 70 km more, still because of the famous Umleitung, although here, the last ones were more due to works than to flooded roads… According to the news, more than 40 litres/m²/24 hours fell on already waterlogged soils from the previous weeks… The result was quite predictable…

We also made a stop at the Maulbronn Monastery, a very well preserved medieval Cistercian monastery, with the old buildings of the town surrounding it (today converted into a town hall, a restaurant, a bookstore, etc.). The place is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and, frankly, it is well deserved…

Between the Rhine and the Moselle (4/06/2024)

Second day without rain… We’ll start to get used to it! 😜 We went a little further northeast, and changed regions (Länder, for the experts): from Baden-Württemberg, we went to Rheinland-Pfalz… It doesn’t seem like much, but coincidentally, the deep woods of the Black Forest suddenly disappeared and we were surrounded by immense fields of cereals and some scattered groves of trees, in a hilly landscape, barely 300 m high. And in the middle runs a river (as Brad Pitt would say…). In this case, the Rhine, which today we crossed again, but this time in a south-north direction, in its 100% German part…

Our first stop was the city of Heidelberg, Germany’s favorite tourist destination with more than 11 million visitors a year. This was the town of residence of the Grimm Brothers (those from the tales of the same name) and of Carl Bosch, known for having invented… (those who answered “the washing machine” please leave immediately!… 🤓). No, Carl Bosch has nothing to do with the appliance brand of the same name. In fact, he was a chemist who won a Nobel Prize for developing the Haber-Bosch process, important for the large-scale synthesis of fertilizers and explosives. It doesn’t sound like much, but it is estimated that one third of the world’s annual food production uses ammonia produced with the Haber-Bosch process, and that this supports almost half of the world’s population. Carl Bosch also co-developed the so-called Bosch-Meiser process for the industrial production of urea. And for those who would lose sleep tonight thinking about who founded the multinational company Bosch if it wasn’t Carl, the answer is: his uncle Robert…

Well, okay, it’s probably not the Grimm Brothers or Carl Bosch who attract 11 million tourists a year to Heidelberg (although the city does indeed have a Carl Bosch museum…). It is also and above all “the most visited ruin in the world” (says the official website of the city of Heidelberg…): Heidelberg Castle. In ruins, true, but still quite pretty with its gardens offering a panoramic view of the city and the Neckar River that runs at its feet (well, today it was more like “over” its feet, and up to its ankles, but well…).

North of Heidelberg we crossed the Rhine again and also the great plain that borders it. An immense basin full of factories and agricultural areas, not very interesting, but fortunately the motorways are free in Germany. With this, our progression to the North is greatly improving these days. German autobahns are also known for not having speed limits (well, some of them, in some stretches), but that doesn’t really change much for us. Marvin goes at his own pace and not faster! 😜

On the other side of the Rhine plain we found more hills, although lower than those on the south. And suddenly, we came across a kind of valley carved by a huge river: the Moselle (Mosel, in German 🤓). And yes, although it starts in the Vosges and crosses the department to which it gives its name before passing through Luxembourg (under the artistic pseudonym of Musel), the Moselle crosses a good part of Germany before reaching the Rhine, precisely in Koblenz (and then, returns to France through the latter…). Before that, it creates beautiful landscapes (and a tourist attraction for the towns in the area, since it is navigable)…

Last but not least, we have to explain why we are moving so fast north since we arrived in Germany (and it’s not just because of the highways 😜). Germany may be the country of camping and caravans of all kinds, but it turns out that all forest roads are closed to traffic (except for some that, in any case, are too full of deep potholes or too flooded to pass). In fact, wild camping is prohibited in Germany and sleeping in a vehicle is only tolerated. As a result, we find ourselves confined to parking lots (nice ones though, in the forest or on the edges of forests), created especially for parking and hiking. They are called Wanderparkplatz, and they are practically the only places where you can sleep more or less close to nature, as long as you choose your place very carefully because they are not always very isolated or far from roads or towns… This explains why we move so quickly towards Denmark, while it took us much longer in Spain or France. Sleeping in parking lots, no matter how wooded they may be, is not our thing… 😉

One castle a day… (5/06/2024)

Before continuing north, this morning we had an appointment with Count Karl and Countess Sophia Eltz, descendants of the long lineage of the Eltz family and current owners of the family castle. 😉

This was the last castle on our list and, frankly, along with Lichtenstein Castle, it was also the prettiest. We were also able to see this one without fog, so… it probably helps!… Another castle straight out of a fairy tale. This one is not placed on a rock but, curiously, nestled in the forest, in a hollow next to the Eltz River, a tributary of the Moselle… However, it is still very beautiful with its slender roofs that seem to compete to get as high as possible. The mix of stone and white painted walls also reinforces this fairy tale impression, and we really expected to find a knight, a princess or a bitter old mother-in-law behind each tower…

A beautiful castle to conclude our tour of the German “burg” and “schloss”. By the way, for the curious, “burg” are castles historically intended for defensive purposes, while “schloss” were purely “ornamental” castles, where people lived, but in no way intended to defend anything… And that’s all for today’s German lesson… 🤓

Beyond the Ruhr… (7/06/2024)

After two nice days of rest on our hill, between two fields and four tractors making hay (even at night, yesterday…), we headed north again…

We did today’s journey mainly on highways, which allowed us to reach our destination a little faster and, above all, avoid crossing the famous industrial Ruhr basin (which is not really in the Top 10 of the most photogenic landscapes in Germany ). Surprisingly, from the highway, the view was not that bad, if you consider that we were facing the first industrial basin in Western Europe, with its 5.203.100 inhabitants (the largest urban agglomeration in Germany and the sixth in Europe in number of inhabitants). There is still quite a bit of greenery left: 40,7% of the Ruhr area is occupied by agricultural land and 17,6% by forest areas (according to estimates by the Ruhr Regionalverband).

But the big change is that with the Rhur basin, we left behind our last mountains (including any possible undulation of the terrain with a height greater than 200 m) for a long time… The funny thing is that, during the day, we were commenting that we had a hard time identifying clearly the German regions… Unlike Spain or France, where the regions are quite well marked (mountains, deserts, rounded hills, volcanoes, drier or more lush vegetation), here, all the landscapes look a little alike (except for the Black Forest, of course): hilly landscapes with large fields of crops and small, more or less exploited forests (what also shocked us is that, here, logging is generally done at 100%… we thus found quite a few slopes where there was nothing left, except one or two trees that had miraculously passed between the blades of the machines, etc.).

That was before we reached our destination for the day… We were in Lower Saxony, in the municipality of Alfhausen, next to Lake Alfsee, and here the landscapes are radically different: everything is flat, with large fields of corn, wheat or potatoes as far as the eye can see, and trees that serve as hedges between these fields. It is hard to find the slightest relief within kilometres around, but here, at least here, we see that we are in a different region. 😁 What also changes is that in the fields, you see much more wildlife. We already saw a pheasant, two roe deer, a few hares and a coipu!

Hohes Moor (8/06/2024)

Our long descent towards the North Sea continues. Yesterday, with our approximately 30 m altitude, we thought we had reached the bottom, but no!… Today, and for a brief moment (and on the highway, which is higher than the rest of the region), the GPS marked -1 m!… 😱

Well, okay, for a Dutch this probably wouldn’t be very surprising… But for us, it was the first time! We had already walked below sea level (in Death Valley, in the US), but we had never driven under the sea… And well, after this small moment of exaltation in front of the GPS screen, we continued our route. Second day almost exclusively on highways and… the records are falling (in this Olympic summer, we are accumulating medals 🤓)! Average consumption today: 15,1 L/100 km!! Never seen before!!… And after having climbed a little, we slept 2 m above sea level (and we were lucky because around us, the terrain was down to 7 m below sea level… you would almost need a hyperbaric box to come up again the next morning 🤣)… Well, okay, okay… I’ll stop with my negative altitudes jokes because I see that I’m the only one excited here… 🙄!

The news of the day was that we discovered the region of Germany where the people are nice… We were beginning to despair, but no… We just had to get closer to Hamburg. Here (and unlike the rest of the country), people are smiling, outgoing, welcoming… They even come up to chat (despite the language barrier) and ask us where we come from or where we are going… In short, Germany as we would have liked to see it until now!… Furthermore, that night we innovated… For a change from more or less wild Wanderparkplatz we slept at Jens and Tanya’s, a couple of farmers (well… on a very small scale, eh… just a few apple trees and 5 or 6 chickens, and a large field to mow, with a big house at one end) . In fact, it’s a bit like the France Passion system. They have a large piece of land, they are willing to lend it to those, like us, looking for a flat place to spend a night, and that’s it! Everyone happy! Furthermore, for only 1 euro they gave us a box with 6 eggs from the chickens that were happily pecking between Marvin’s wheels (not even at Aldi there is anything better!! 😜). So that night we slept on a farm, at the end of a large field where Jens had just cut the hay and which looked like a large football field, with a house next to it… and Marvin in the middle. 😁

The good thing was that we were sure to be on “stable” ground. We were near Hamburg, and more precisely, between Hamburg, the Elbe and the coast, and it turns out that, just like in Holland (very close), most of this region would be invaded by the sea without the large dikes along of the coast and the river, which prevent the entry of water (that is, polders…). But unlike the Netherlands, there are not many canals here and therefore the water “resurges” in some places and forms more or less extensive peat bogs. We went to see one before settling on our farm and it is quite impressive. At first glance there is not much difference between one field and another. But when you start walking, you realize that some plots are cultivated, while others are covered with trees. And these, up close, are actually full of water. These are the places where the ground is lowest and where water rises from underground. It forms beautiful marshy mosaics, and all this seems to be a delight for the wild geese and other ducks of all kinds that live there. In the “dry” fields (which are actually not that dry), we also saw cranes! With water everywhere, there must be so many worms and other bugs in the ground that they have everything they need to get through the summer before returning south in the fall!… So, finally, we were able to see the famous cranes that we had been looking for since we passed through Aragon (and the Landes)… We had to get to Hohes Moor to see them!… 😍

Last night in Germany (9/06/2024)

That’s it! This morning, we took our first ferry on this trip to cross the Elbe River. Apart from being more fun, this allowed us to avoid the entire Hamburg city area (and quite a few kilometres). So… here we are, less than 80 km from Denmark, just behind a dam that protects the fields and towns around here from any flooding of the Eider River. One more day, we were excited (or at least, I was 🤓) to see how the GPS indicated -6 m altitude at some point during the journey! Tomorrow, we leave Germany and begin a new chapter of this adventure with our official entry to Scandinavia!… 🇩🇰

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IN Germany, as anywhere else, LEAVE NO TRACE!

– Always travel on public ways and respect the signs.
– Limit noise and interfere as little as possible with wildlife.
– Respect the other users.
– Leave rocks, plants and other natural features as you found them and respect historic sites.
– Take your waste with you and throw it into the appropriate containers, in the nearest village.
– Do not camp inside protected areas and do not make any fires.