March 6 - Volksmarch in Husum

To make our plan to walk in Husum work we had to be out of the house by 6:45, so for the first time in Germany we set the alarm clock for 6:15. Somehow it seemed blasphemous to set an alarm clock when you are retired and on vacation, to boot, but the trains running north to Husum only left Altona every hour and we had to cross the center of Hamburg to get to Altona on the western fringe. There were several links in this chain of public transportation: bus to Reinbek train station, S-Bahn from Reinbek to Hauptbahnhof, change to a different S-Bahn from Hauptbahnhof to Altona, and then express train from Altona to Husum. I became a little nervous when the bus was several minutes late—we no longer had time to walk to the Reinbek station and make our train—but the bus did come and get us to the train station in time. Otherwise, the plan worked like clockwork and was a very relaxing way to get to Husum, which lies about two hours north of Hamburg on the North Sea coast.

The trip north was thru a landscape that was as flat as a pancake but also surprisingly wet. That is, most of the fields had standing water, actual ponds, or drainage ditches. In fact, it almost seemed to be a moorland. We saw horses, sheep, and cattle grazing on some fields while other fields seemed to be used to grow hay, but I didn’t see evidence of any row crops. Of course, it was still early in the season (snow was forecast for that evening), so maybe spring planting simply hadn’t begun yet.

We arrived in Husum on time, walked outside to find some street names and orient ourselves, and walked north ½ a kilometer to the starting point for the Volksmarch in a large city school on Asmussen Street. Unlike the Wedel walk, there were no signs leading us to the starting point, so it was a darn good thing that we had looked at the maps of the inner city the night before using some German map software (Grosse Reiseplaner). Anyway, we paid our fee, collected our start cards, and started off on a 15-kilometer walk that circled Husum.

It really was a great, albeit long, walk, taking over three hours. Along the way we saw some sheep (with their derriere’s spray-painted green!), a field of windmills churning along producing electricity (see Wanderung 2), and at the very end the Husum harbor and the old Husum palace. Actually, we saw the palace only because we missed a turn and had to find our own way back to the start point at the very end, but it seemed like a nice palace as those things go. If Husum hadn’t had a Maritime Museum, we might have visited the palace after the walk, but as it was we never did get around to it.

Our route also traversed the old downtown area, which featured really tiny streets and shops with very old facades. Besides being old and having bags of atmosphere, the downtown area seemed to be really vibrant and busy. I’m not sure what keeps the economy going since they gave up building ships here around 1996, but the city seemed to be surviving quite nicely.

Fortunately the friendly folks back at the start point still had some food left when we returned, so we each had some pea soup with potatoes, pieces of pork, and hot dogs in it. It wasn’t more than warm, but it was both filling and nourishing. I had worked up quite an appetite, however, and had both seconds on the soup and three servings of desert! Re-energized somewhat after that lunch, we retraced our steps to the maritime museum at the edge of the harbor, more formally known as “Schiffahrtsmuseum Nordfriesland e. V.”.

As tired as I was, I just couldn’t do my normal thorough job of reading everything in the museum, but they had beautiful models of ships plus many nautical artifacts. I am partial to the models of the old sailing ships, of course, and they had plenty of those as well as models of newer ships like lifesaving boats, coastguard cutters, etc. One display I saw there that I seldom see in nautical museums was an explanation of longitude and latitude, which, considering how important that is to maritime commerce, is quite surprising.

The centerpiece of the museum is, however, a “sugar ship”—a hull of a sailing ship from about 1620 that has been preserved by soaking it for a couple of years in a concentrated sugar solution! The hull of this old coastal sailing vessel was uncovered by accident in the early 1990s and became an archeological project par excellence. The preservation with sugar apparently works as well to support the old wood as using more complex chemicals, but the hull has to be kept dry, cool, and of course far away from ants! In any event it was interesting to see an almost 400 year old sailing ship—I’ve sung some 400 year old songs and it gives me a certain charge to think that just maybe those sailors might have heard some songs like that being sung.

The curious thing about those 4-century old songs is that they really sound like they could have been composed yesterday. No joke; the words (translated from Italian), sentiment (romantic problems), melodies and harmonies are not, to me at least, distinguishable from some modern songs. That leads to the question of exactly how far back you could understand popular music and songs, an interesting question that I’d like to see answered by some musicologists if, in fact, they know. So much of the old music and songs died out with the oral music traditions that supported them that we may never know the answer, but it would be nice to think that love songs go back about as far as Homo Sapiens does.

After climbing up the 4 stories and walking thru all the exhibits of the museum, we were dog-tired and headed straight back toward the train station for the trip home. On the way we passed a much larger museum focused on the Husum area and local culture, but that was another 4 floors of a building covering the better part of a city block, and I just didn’t have the legs for it anymore. But if you ever get to Husum you might want to also check out that museum as well as the local palace that looked very nice (and big!) from the outside.

We only had enough energy to prop ourselves upright in the seats and watch the countryside fly by the train window as dusk fell. Visibility dropped rather dramatically, however, and I finally conned on to the fact that it was snowing! I hated to admit that, somehow, as I kept optimistically thinking this was “spring”. Sometimes it seems that Germany, like some of the northern U.S. states, has the 4 basic seasons of: Almost Winter, Deep Winter, Still Winter, and Road Construction!

So amid the snow flurries we returned to a Reinbek that looked like a Christmas Wonderland, which would have been fine except that it was March for gods sake. We would have had to wait 27 minutes for a bus while standing in the snow, so despite still being quite tired we opted for the 15-minute walk home.

The final part of the hike home was straight uphill and by the end we kind of dragged in the front door and flopped down to have a light evening meal while watching the 8 o’clock news. The news was followed by a TV show called Music Stadl (Music Village) from Seefeld, Austria with all kinds of southern German and Austrian music plus the Glen Miller orchestra from the U.S. for a change of pace. To me that was really foot-stomping, knee-slapping good music and a very nice way to end the day, except that I was too tired to either stomp my foot and my legs hurt too much to slap them!