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Wanderung 5

Happy Haus for Holt’s in Hamburg.

February - April 2004

March 13 - Schleswig Volksmarch

Our goal this weekend was to take the train up to Schleswig, a small city in Schleswig-Holstein, to take a Volksmarch there. The address for our starting point for the Volksmarch in Schleswig was 32 Gottorp Skolen Schleswig Erdbeerenberg (Gottorp School of Scheswig on Strawberry-mountain). I found approximate coordinates for that address using the Grosse Reiseplanner map software we bought in Germany last year; I estimated the address was located at 9 degrees, 32 minutes, and 8 seconds east longitude and 54 degrees, 30 minutes, and 11 seconds north latitude. I plugged those coordinates into my GPS and marked it with a little flag for future reference while walking.

Looking at the map of the area was also very interesting. The Schlei River runs east-northeast from Schleswig to the coast of the Baltic Sea thru a series of small lakes. Heinke and Gustl have their boat moored on the Schlei River at a marina at Kappeln, which is almost at the mouth of the river where it joins the Baltic. We went sailing with them from Kappeln a couple of years back, so we’ve already been on one part of this river, but Schleswig was about 40 kilometers upstream and I expected the river to be a lot smaller, maybe more like a creek.

So we bought another Schleswig-Holstein day ticket, which allowed us to take trains anywhere in that district for the whole day, and immediately afterwards took the express train from Hamburg Hauptbahnhof to Schleswig.

The countryside traveling north was similar to what we had seen on our trip north to Husum the previous weekend. Schleswig is only about 40 kilometers east of Husum, so it wasn’t too surprising that the flat, wet landscape extended into that area. Another thing that we couldn’t help but notice is how much of the landscape is pockmarked by mole tunnels. They even have thrown up some dirt in the yard at Aunt Size’s house and many of the yards and farms in the Reinbek area. But I noticed that in the really swampy, wet areas of the fields there was absolutely no sign of them. Possibly the moles have to build their tunnels near the surface where the water table is quite high, which occurs a lot in this area! If it’s too high, their tunnels are flooded, and if it’s low enough like in the hills, the tunnels are deeper and you can’t see them so easily.

I also had fun looking at each of the small towns we passed thru. Altho they were similar in having many of the sturdy brick German houses with steeply pitched roofs covered with baked tiles, different towns conveyed a different atmosphere. It’s hard to judge that from a passing train, but in some sense you roll by the “back yards” of every building in the main area of the town, and you get some ideas from that. Some places, for example, were very neat while others had a surprising amount of litter around the tracks. Economically, some towns appeared to me to be sleepy little cow-villages (German: Kuehdorfer) while others seem to be more vibrant, business-oriented places. It was very nice to be in a train where I could look at such things and think about them rather than driving white-knuckled along the autobahns and country highways.

The bridge over the North Sea to Baltic Sea canal was very interesting in part because it was very high so that the train would clear the bridges of the ships. We were lucky on this train trip that we did see some ships transiting the canal—understandable since they saved the entire trip up around Denmark that way—and I was able to lower the window and take some pictures. The bridge on the north side of the canal was built in a huge 360-degree circle so that the train could gradually descend to the train station at Rendsburg after the crossing. All in all, I really enjoyed the train ride and was rested and ready to go when we arrived in Schleswig.

As soon as we got out of the train station, I turned on the GPS and waited for it to get a fix. Seeing the starting point with it’s little flag helped me orient myself and decide which way to walk to get to there. After signing up and starting the walk, I would occasionally refer to our track shown on the GPS map page to at least have a general idea where we were and which way we should go. As long as we had a stream of people in front of us, following the route was easy because it basically came down to following the folks ahead of us. Coincidentally, the first part of the route also was part of the trans-Europe “X” route that passed near our house in Reinbek. That part of the trail was a paved hiker-biker trail about 1 meter from the edge of the road, a great track and a really easy ride compared to the sections of “X” in the woods near us!

But later on in the walk we had problems following the route. We had chosen the 15-kilometer route, and the stream of people thinned out as the 5 and 10 kilometer routes turned off from us. In fact, we were pretty much alone on the last part of the walk. It also seemed that altho the 5 and 10-km sections were well marked, the last section of the 15-kilometer route seemed to have skimpy and inconsistent markings. One of the major intersections was not marked at all, and it was just by luck we choose the right way. There was also no consistency in marking when the trail turned. The trail master used 1 streamer both for corners where the trail went straight and for corners where the trail turned. Back home we used double steamers to indicate turns, but here they simply occasionally used double streamers along the straight sections without any apparent rhyme or reason.

Another problem was that they absolutely did not have any markings on the “straight ahead” sections. The problem with that is that if you just keep walking straight, you never know if the trail has turned away from you or not, so you can keep going for a really long time in the wrong direction before you’re sure you’re wrong. We had problems with finding the route several times while we are walking the last 7 kilometers of the route, and we finally missed a critical turnoff just like we did the previous week in Husum. But this time there was a checkpoint on the loop we missed, so we tried to backtrack to find it. Trying to track the route backward was even worse than trying to follow it forward, so we once again got lost. We persevered going backward and finally found the turnoff we had missed and then reversed course to follow other people down the route the correct way. The net result was that we walked an additional 2 kilometers and about a half an hour longer than the anticipated 3 hours for 15 kilometers. That would not have been too bad except it was raining for most of the walk and we were getting chilled as the rain gradually soaked through our jackets.

But with the GPS there was no danger in getting entirely lost, and we saw a lot of beautiful old houses and farms along the way. We also chanced across two small but very surprising monuments. One was a War Memorial for the German soldiers from the Schleswig area who were killed in WWII. All the names were engraved on it, and this memorial echoed the similar memorials I had seen in the towns on Prince Edward Island in Canada, and the withered flower wreaths decorating it expressed the feelings of loss the older generation must feel about WWII. But the other monument was far, far older and much more mysterious. Right next to the street in a vacant lot was a stone circle with a kind of miniature “Stonehenge” in the middle consisting of two upright stones with a capstone. I’m not sure what this thing was or exactly how old it was—the archeological placard on the lot didn’t tell me—but I would guess either Paleolithic tribes put it there a couple of thousand years ago or it was an old Viking grave. Interesting!

We curled back thru town and got a glimpse of the Schleswig Palace before returning to our start point. The palace had been turned into a museum of some kind, but it was still at least a kilometer off and we didn’t have the extra energy to walk over and tour it. It was amazing how often we ran across things that we had to forgo but would have liked to investigate further if we had just a little more time and energy. Certainly that was also true of the trips we had taken in various parts of the U.S., so maybe that is simply one of the frustrating truisms of life.

Back at the finish point the folks stamped our books and gave us credit for 16 kilometers, but with the walks to and from the train stations and getting lost, we had surely done several more kilometers and were really tired and hungry at the end. Monika had a wurst and potato salad and I tried a slice of Leberkase (something like a slice of cheese and liver pate) with Kartoffelsalat (potato salad), which I followed with a couple of fruit torte type of desserts. After lunch we were rested and refueled, so we set off in search of a Viking museum that we had seen in the Grosse Reiseplaner map. There were no signs to this place and the people we asked along the way also didn’t have a very clear idea about where it was, so it was no wonder that we got lost once again and walked another couple of kilometers out of our way. We finally found the right street, but the lady who confirmed that also told us that it was at least a couple of kilometers farther away. I just didn’t think my legs would take walking out that far, standing for another couple of hours, and then walking the 3-4 kilometers back to the train station, so we retraced our steps over to the train station and took the train home.

It started rating and even sleeting while we rode home, so I was glad we hadn’t made the side trip over to the museum and been caught on the way back. It was so nice to sit in the warm train while drying off. And we were rewarded by a gorgeous sunset as we chugged back into Reinbek. So I took some pictures as we walked back up the main street to Goetheallee. The red clouds acted as a great backdrop to some of the buildings and the little pond that lined the main street.

Back at home we took off our hiking belts and settled in for a even meal of Frikadelle (a round cooked patty of hamburger type meat but without a bun) and rolls. On evening TV we watched a curious quiz program called “Pisa” which presented teams representing each of the German states with problems to solve. The problems where mathematical, logical, or everyday problems and they certainly kept careful score! Fortunately the moderator was quite funny and kept the tone of the whole thing light. It was a relaxing way to unwind, unstiffen, and prepare for bed.

Copyright 2004 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog Map Epilog

February 2004
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March 2004
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April 2004
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