Heidelberg and Bavaria

After Berlin, we spent three days with my old friend Matt Bush in Schwitzingen, a suburb just outside of Heidelberg. The fact that neither Matt nor I could remember when we last saw each other quickly disappeared into the timelessness of old friendships. It has been something like 15 years, but “you pick up where you left off,” as my mom used to say. Matt and his wife, Clare, have been in Germany now for a decade. Both work as contractors with the United States Department of Defense with schools on a nearby base. I interviewed them both a good deal about their jobs and lives here in Germany. Annette is far more familiar with this way of life than I am. Sounds like a great quality of life, even if they get paid in U.S. Dollars, get U.S. vacation schedules, and spend their days inside a red-tape filled but well-funded bureaucracy with the Department of Defense. And living and working in communities where most of your colleagues, students and families move every few years doesn't sound like such a bad thing either. It seems to keep them light on their feet. And then there is the recent addition of the show stopper. At 20-something inches and 20-something pounds, with bright blue eyes, a smile that will make you blush and new hair that seems to be leaning toward becoming red, five month old Dahlia is a pretty cool baby to hang out with.

We spent a long weekend in Heidelberg with a good mix of baby-friendly activities--hiking and seeing everything from the town to the Palace Gardens in Schwitzingen to the local U.S. military base. We had some good German meals, including jaeger schnitzel (fried veal with mushroom sauce), my first knight pan (English translation) with sausage, gherkins, and red peppers (think small wok with deliciousness inside), and ample amounts of local draft beer. Evenings were reserved for hanging out at the house, drinking and talking into the wee hours, much like we did 15 years ago, except that now a baby can sleep through it.

Our plans to leave Schwitzingen on Monday fell victim to Sunday night's celebrations. When we weren't on the road by 2 pm, we decided to enjoy another day and start again, earlier, tomorrow.

On Tuesday, we drove from Schwitzingen to Bad Windscheim, Annette's preschool home. Without much difficulty, we found the five-story apartment building she used to call home. Actually, we found the playground and triangulated everything from there, including the candy store and preschool. It is funny trying to piece it together from the memories of a five-year old. Everything is bigger than Annette remembers. And closer. The playground is right behind her old apartment building along a great walking path. Like much of Germany, towns and cities are far more walking and biker friendly than car-friendly. If it weren't for the autobahns, I would say that statement holds true for the whole country.

We wandered from the playground toward what looked to be a kindergarten. We walked in expecting an office to find a lobby area lined with little coats and shoes. The building then split into a few classrooms on each side of the lobby. We caught the eye of a female teacher. When Annette tried to explain in English that she though she might have been a student here years ago, the teacher went to find somebody who could speak English. That person was Frau Eckstein. Annette barely got through her first few words of introduction when Frau Eckstein exclaimed, “Annie” and squeezed her cheeks. Yes. This was Annette's teacher twenty years ago. And they used to call her Annie.

After catching up on what brings us to Germany, Frau Eckstein invited us into the classroom. It was crowded, but beautifully designed. One wall was all windows with a big glass door out to the outdoor play area. Wood beams provided storage forming a false ceiling six-and-a-half feet high across half the room. Under that were five tables, each with five or six chairs around it for group activities. The walls had bookshelves and cubbies, and a small kitchen that seemed to be fully working, complete with an oven. The other half of the room had a few steps up to a sitting area for resting and perhaps group story time. A few more steps lead up to a fort of sorts, which is where Frau Eckstein still remembers little Annette perched. Annette walked up there, ducking her head the whole time to look down on the classroom as she had two decades earlier. The visit was short but moving.

After an hour, we were on to the Deutches Touring Yacht Club on the Starnberger See in Tutzing, about 45 minutes Southwest of Munich. Our friend, Micky, who came through New Orleans a bit more than two years ago with Benedikt, whom we had seen in Hamburg, would be our host. Benedikt and Micky met at a regatta and decided to roadtrip the U.S. together. Micky now lives in a suburb just outside of Munich but thought we would be best served by staying at the yacht club, which sounded ok to us.

Micky works designing electric cars for BMW. He was coming from work to meet us. We beat him to Tutzing and dipped our toes in the lake while we waited. The day was sunny. It was a day we had been looking for since our soaking tent in Amsterdam. Sunny and warm enough to swim. Fresh air. Sailboats on the lake. And the Alps calling to me from their perch across the lake.

The Deutches Touring Yacht Club has been Micky's base since childhood. He competes at a level just below Olympic sailing, primarily across Europe. But the yacht club is quiet. It has three stories of small rooms in it above the casino, which is a two-room restaurant. There are maybe thirty boats in the docks, all sailboats except for two. One of these is a beautiful wooden motor boat. Micky and his friend Felix spent nearly two years outfitting it with an electric motor. It runs incredibly quietly off of several lithium-ion batteries. He showed us to a room on the third floor, complete with two twin beds, a fridge, a sink with hot and cold water and a bathroom across the hall. Over wiess beers at the beirgarten overlooking the lake and the Alps, Annette and I quickly declare to Micky, Felix and several of their friends that we may stay a week or two here.

And here we are on Sunday night at the Deutches Touring Yacht Club. I love Bavaria. It feels like the playground of Germany. It will make you forget that Hitler came to power in these parts in Munich. The Alps are closer than they appear. Thirty minutes of driving fun windy roads and we are in the mountains. We have done day trips from here. We rode a gondola up Herzogstandt and hiked for the better part of a day to views across the valley and deep into the mountains across to Austria. Well-maintained and well-worn trails welcomed us, even as we hiked half a kilometer across the spine of a mountain maybe one meter wide, with dramatic drops on both sides. We returned from rain in the mountains to sunshine and evening swimming in Sternberger See.

The next day, we dismissed the dreariness of the gray clouds outside our window and the weather reports to drive two-and-a-half hours southeast to Birtchesgaden, another of Annette's childhood memories. We visited the salt mines the walls of which she remembers licking as a child. The overpriced tour through the top three stories of a still-active mine provided a fascinating history of salt mining in Bavaria that dates back nearly 1,000 years. Most of the salt is actually extracted by flooding the mines and then removing the salt from the brine. The tour also provided some carnival-like surprises including a few “miner's chutes.” These 50 to 100-meter slides elicited screams from Annette each time we slid down them. And then there was a light show on a mirror lake underground that would make Pink Floyd proud. Despite the signs forbidding pictures, I brought the camera with the flash turned off and the shutter speed extra slow to document what I could. The tour guide wore a uniform, spoke German and didn't smile. It gave me a rush and some joy to take pictures, feeling like I was rebelling against some Nazi. I imagined if I got caught, they would drop me deep in the mine, a maze I could not find my way out of. We ended the day hiking around the Konigsee. Parts of the trail were no longer maintained and provided some entertaining rock hopping to a waterfall, far beyond where most hikers had turned around.

BMW only requires its employees to work 35 hours per week. So Micky took off Friday to take us to Neuschwanstein, the medieval castle crazy Konig Ludwig II built to honor Wagner in the late 1880s. He was declared mentally ill well before its completion and shortly after was found dead with his psychiatrist in the Sternberger See. The castle is the most touristy place we have visited yet, with tours every ten minutes in English, German, Mandarin Chinese, French, Italian and audio-guides from so many countries that we spent most of our time in the forty-minute ticket line guessing which flags go with which countries and which languages. We hiked around a bit and visited a biergarten before our thirty-minute tour arrived. The wood carvings and details of the castle are enough to declare insane the guy who paid for them and supposedly bankrupted the royal family. By the end of the tour, Annette is convinced that Wagner was Ludwig's secret boyfriend. We hike a bit farther to a bridge across a gorge 80 meters above a waterfall with postcard views of the castle and the waterfalls below.

We end the day in Andechs Closter. This is a monastery and a brewery. Monks across Germany have been brewing beer for centuries. Beer drinking does seem to be a religion here. Apparently swine eating is too. I had the schwinesaxe, a pig shank, presumably a femur or the arm's equivalent. The meat is deliciously tender and juicy with crunchy tasty skin around it. Cracklin' is the English word. Not sure what the German word is for the skin, but it has never tasted so good.

We rested up Saturday for a heavy night of drinking in Munich with Micky and a few of his friends. After a few beers, the night really started at Hofbrauhaus with a great meal and a one liter stein of beer each. It turns out we cannot drink like Germans can, as we stumbled from bar to bar, carried around warm beer we couldn't finish and fell asleep in the cab ride home at 1:30 a.m. (The night was far more fun than it sounds!) It left for a slow and sleepy Sunday of watching Formula One racing, eating pizza, and heading back to Tutzing for dinner and an early and rainy night around 6 p.m.

This week, we look forward to a few sunny days with hiking around Garmisch and the Eibsee, visiting some thermal baths, Dachau concentration camp, and heading to Prague. Then south to Croatia or Italy or both.