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Wanderung 5

Happy Haus for Holt’s in Hamburg.

February - April 2004

March 19 - Our first walk in Moelln.

With the weather forecast to be cloudy (what else?) but dry and not too cold, we decided to walk one of the Volksmarch year-round-events (YRE) in Moelln, Germany. We chose that one because not only was it the closest available YRE to us but we could also reach it by just buying a supplementary card for our CC Karten. That made the transportation to and from the walk about 11 Euro total, which was relatively inexpensive.

Getting there was, as the saying goes, half the fun. We took the Hamburg S-Bahn from Reinbek to Aumuehle, then an electric inter-urban shuttle type of train from Aumuehle to Buechen, and finally a two carriage diesel-electric rig from Buechen north to Moelln. The scheduling of all of these lines is coordinated by the German train system and since everything runs on time it works well. I was particularly lucky when we switched at Aumuehle that I got a chance to check where my bicycle pump had fallen off the previous day. Fortunately I saw it lying (undamaged!) between the tracks and jumped down to retrieve it. Tossing it up on the platform was easy, but then I had to decide whether to try to walk around and find an easy way up or try to hoist myself back up the concrete side of the platform. Of course, I knew our train to Buechen was leaving in only a minute or two, there was a high-voltage hot rail right beside me, and another S-Bahn from Hamburg would be pulling in where I was standing any minute. Well, all together that gave me the impetus to just jump up and hoist myself over the edge of the platform. Who says white boys can’t jump?—we just need to be motivated! It was kind of a moral victory to retrieve something I thought was lost and gone forever, even if it was just a bicycle pump.

Another close shave occurred when we transferred to another train in Buechen. We knew we had exactly 4 minutes to switch over to the next train to Moelln, and we couldn’t find out where it was! None of the tracks we could find had the train to Moelln listed as a departure. Consider that this is a Podunk station that had only 4 tracks as far as we could see, and you might understand why we were both surprised and at the same time frustrated to not find our train, after all, Hamburg Hauptbahnhof this was not! Things were getting pretty tense in train land, sports fans, but we finally asked a ticket agent and found where they were hiding the train off on a small siding diagonally in back of the station. The station turned out to have 4½ tracks numbered 1, 4, 140, 40, and 41 (the hidden siding track), which has got to be one of the oddest track numbering schemes I have ever encountered. Due to running back and forth among the tracks we were probably a bit late arriving for our next train, but the engineer saw us running and waited until we could hop on board, which was nice.

The folks sitting next to us in the train to Moelln were reading a morning paper called “Der Braunschweiger”, and the strong association that flashed into my mind was that “Braunsweiger” was the type of liver sausage I ate when I was a child—very flavorful, by the way. But the idea of naming a newspaper “The Liver Sausage” fired off a bunch of competing names for papers like “The Daily Donut”, “The Weekly Watercress”, “The Monthly Melon” and so forth, and I had to contain my mirth lest the folks think I was a bit deranged. Creating newspaper names did pass the time, however, and we were shortly at the train station in Moelln, which looked rather deserted when we arrived. If anyone is interested 'Braunschweig' is a city at the end of the line, thus people had brought their newspaper (Monika).

Our first task was to find the start box to register for our walk, and Monika had the idea of wandering all over the city to the different information centers, asking at each one if they by any chance had the Volksmarch start box. So we marched into the center of town, stopping at information kiosks along the way but not finding any persons to ask or any trace of a start box. We did, however enjoy the old houses, the cathedral, and a statue of “Till Eulenspiegel” a jester who is the trademark figure of Moelln.


 

After a couple of kilometers and a 40 minutes or so, Monika finally broke down and called the contract person for the walk, who told us that the start box was at a sundries store on the outside perimeter of the train station! So we hiked back to the train station and purchased nice little walking booklets for 5.50 Euro each at the sundries store (think of a miniature version of a 7-11 in the U.S.).

The booklets we purchased had the title “IVV—Rundwanderweg Wanderfuehrer” (roughtly translates as “International Volkssport Club Circuit Hike Walking Guide”) and contained 56 pages of instructions for a total of 8 different circuit hikes. Each circuit hike had an overview type of map with the route clearly marked in red plus fairly detailed directions (except when they were not). These circuit hikes were not, however, for the faint hearted. The shortest walk was 14 kilometers and the longest was 29 kilometers, which is a doggoned long day’s walk by anyone’s standards. That would be anyone except Fred, of course, who is to Volksmarching what Michael Jordan is to basketball, Tiger Woods is to golf, and Lance Armstrong is to bicycle racing. Fred, with or without his bushy black beard, is rather quiet and modest person that you might not normally notice when he passes you on the street. How do I know he would pass you? Well, he seems to walk slowly but really walks deceptively fast so trust me, he would be the one catching up with you. If you ever do get the good fortune to meet him (out walking, I assume), don’t ask him how far he has already walked that day unless you want to feel rather small by comparison. I was walking 10 kilometers early one afternoon and feeling frisky when Fred came breezing by so I asked that question, and it turned out he had already walked 20 kilometers at a different walk earlier that morning! In total, he has walked a distance equal to at least two trips around the world and is working on the third! It is nice just to know someone who is world-class in anything, I suppose, but particularly pleasant when that person is a really decent sort—Fred and Nancy really dedicate a lot of time and effort keep the sport of Volksmarching alive and well, and folks like that aren’t all that common.

But we struggle just to walk 10-15 kilometers and since we knew we had to take a 2:38 p.m. train back, we decided to start with walk number 6, (the 14 kilometer loop) to leave ourselves plenty of time to catch our train back. We got lost the first time right off the bat when we left the station on the first leg of the loop. We oriented ourselves by the map and managed to get back on the path at the Moelln Rathaus. We found where we went wrong when we came back—it turned out that we should have crossed the street, immediately turned left for ½ block and found a 3-foot wide paved path on the right that looked for all the world like a path into someone’s back yard. But we really had to become accustomed to the method of marking trails used for these walks—typically a small white square about 4” square with the number “6” on it. When we followed the trail thru wooded sections, we found the squares were quite easy to find as the white stood out from the dark tree trunks. On the city streets, however, the squares were placed in places we didn’t expect like lampposts, and they just seemed harder to spot.

The town of Moelln has an old brick water tower on the highest point, and we worked our way uphill toward that landmark before changing course to leave town past a small canal and thru some nearby forested areas.

At one trail intersection I thought the directions told us to turn right, but Monika maintained that since we didn’t see one of the squares we should continue straight ahead. Well, we tried that and ended up getting completely lost. I had, of course my GPS in my shirt pocket, but we had been doing so well that I hadn’t bothered to turn it on! Now a GPS is a great thing if you have it turned on and you can compare your track to a path on the map, but when you first turn it on it just shows you in the middle of a blank map. It turns out that being precisely located on a blank map is worse than useless when you are already lost! Anyway, I belatedly turned the GPS on and we continued blundering our way around in the woods, ultimately making a complete loop before I saw we were coming back to the selfsame trail intersection we had left 20 or 30 minutes ago! How irritating! This time we followed my instincts and took the right hand branch, finally getting back on the correct path. It cost us a couple of kilometers and some time, and I was glad we had a generous cushion of time in catching our train back. Memo to self: turn on the GPS at the beginning of the walk BEFORE you get lost!

Continuing eastward on the correct path thru some very pretty countryside, we finally reached the Pinnsee (Pinn Lake), a little gem of a lake nestled in the wooded hills of a forest preserve area. There was a bathing beach that I’m fairly sure would be crowded in the summer, but it was deserted when we came by. As the lake was our furthest point out, we curled around the shoreline to turn back toward Moelln thru a chain of forests.

At one point we were in a thick evergreen forest and the smell was almost overpowering as we walked on a thick carpet of needles. It felt noticeably cooler there than it did either before or after that stretch, which was refreshing, and all in all it was just a unique and marvelous experience, almost like being in a church. The final leg back to town was between some ponds and along another small but quite picturesque canal.

Altho I was faster in the first section of the walk, after 3 hours I was fading and Monika was still charging along at full speed, making me feel even more tired. We worked our way back to the train station, which was how we finally found that first tricky part, and had our Wanderfuehrer (Trail guide) books stamped at the finish point. We still had enough time to buy lunch at a bakery, two wursts plus potato salad, and sink wearily into chairs to eat it. I even got a desert of something like kiwi plus cherry compote over quark, which has a consistency like cheesecake but is not as rich and, I hoped, not as fatty. We also took along two “Schnecken” (sweet rolls in the shape of snails) for our Kaffeetrinken later that afternoon.

So all’s well that ends well. We successfully caught our chain of trains back to Reinbek, but boy were we stiff and sore when we got off the train at the end. Providentially, we found the 236 bus waiting for us at the train station and we were really glad to be spared yet another uphill trek. Given all our detours, we had probably walked a total of almost 20 kilometers during the day, and that just seemed to be our limit. We took it easy the rest of the day and didn’t move around unnecessarily!

The evening news showed President Bush in a room with the flags of many different countries ostentatiously displayed behind him. Apparently he had invited the ambassadors from all the European countries to the White House and proceeded to give a speech about how they were all united against terrorism. I don’t know how that photo-op played in Peoria, but it fell flat on its face on the German national news show. Their Washington reporter commented at the end of the segment, “You may wonder why this type of meeting was arranged now. Well, it’s quite clear that the campaign for re-election is in full swing here in the U.S. and this meeting was really for internal consumption.” So everything about that meeting was fully discounted in the news coverage that most German viewers would see. From our vantage point in Germany, the fact of the matter was that Europe did not see the war on Iraq as a part of counter terrorism and remained opposed to the U.S. on this issue. Massive anti-war demonstrations were planned for the anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war the next day. The feelings about Afghanistan were quite different—German troops were active in Afghanistan as well as in U.N. peacekeeping hotspots like Kosovo, and there did not seem to be strong opposition to those deployments.

The basic reactions of the German government to things like the Madrid bombings seem to instinctively be defensive rather than offensive. In the U.S. the “strike back” theme has been strong ever since the 9-11 attacks. In Germany, the talk shows were discussing having police stationed on trains and even in stores and bakeries! The folks interviewed were all in favor of some increase in police presence altho some demurred at having police stationed in every store and bakery. However, I never heard anyone mention or even hint at an offensive strike against terrorism like the U.S. had engineered in Afghanistan. The thinking just seems to be inherently about protecting the home ground rather than getting at the roots of the issue.

The curious thing about that, in my humble opinion, is that the historical struggle Hamburg had with pirates in the North Sea was ultimately solved by an offensive rather than a defensive solution. I think the analogy is apt because the pirates operated in a very similar no-holds-barred manner as the modern terrorists and even had safe havens like Helgoland, an island just off the coast in the North Sea. The defensive approach to the pirates was to increase armaments on each and every ship sailing from the port of Hamburg. But as it turned out, continued loses of ships to the pirates finally forced the Hamburg city fathers to fund and build a first-class warship called the “Wappen von Hamburg” in the 1680s. That sucker and its cohorts cruised the North Sea doing convoy duty and ultimately blew the pirates out of the water. That this was a tremendous investment on the part of Hamburg became obvious when a tour guide in the Hamburg history museum informed us that each canon on the Wappen von Hamburg cost as much as an entire merchant ship of the period!

But that was then and this is now, and as I see it the mental framework of the folks now is all on homeland protection, not at all on wiping out terrorism at its source. Of course, one of the biggest sources of terrorism are those radical Islamic schools funded by Saudi Arabia that turn Afghani and Pakistani children into budding little terrorists. I can still remember the interview of one of the graduates of those schools where the young man’s sole claim to fame was that he had memorized every verse of the Koran. He was brainwashed so thoroughly that he felt that was the only important thing he had to do in life except, of course, kill Americans. We in the U.S. can win all the military battles we want to, but if we don’t offer a constructive replacement for those poisonous little schools of religious indoctrination we will never win the war against terrorism.

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

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