March 21 - Neumuenster

I had a Cunning Plan, to wit: we would do the Volksmarch in Neumuenster in the morning and then continue up the line to Schleswig to see the Viking Museum there. Things started going wrong when we hustled over to catch the 7:57 bus to Reinbek train station—there was no 7:57 bus since they only started at 8:57 on Sundays. When Monika discovered that unpleasant fact, we had exactly 15 minutes to catch the S-Bahn we needed to get the 8:43 train from Hauptbahnhof to Neumuenster, so we walked literally as fast as our legs would carry us down to the train station. Fortunately, it was downhill and that helped a lot, but we had wind gusts of up to 60 mph that would still sometimes stop us dead in our tracks. Nevertheless we did catch the S-Bahn at Reinbek, transferred to the regional train at Hauptbahnhof, and were in Neumuenster by about 9:30.

The train network was really wonderful every time we used it in Germany. The trains were always on time (clocks in every train station have sweep second hands so you can check that) and comfortable, and the conductors were polite and efficient. The bathrooms on the train were clean and always worked, altho sometimes I had soap but no water to wash up and other times I had water but no soap! Still, the feeling I always had when riding the trains in Germany was “Ah, that was fun!”—it was just like being coddled in a safe, secure, efficient, quiet, and pleasant way of getting from Point A to Point B (as long as A and B were on train lines!). The majority of trains on the lines were passenger trains, and the only time we ever slowed down was to let another passenger train cross a bridge over the North Sea to Baltic Sea canal in front of us.

In the U.S. in contrast, train journeys have often been unpleasant for me. Being on time is truly a hit-or-miss proposition in the U.S., and when is the last time you saw an accurate clock with a sweep second hand on a U.S. train platform? Amtrak trains also seem run down and dirty, and the ones I have been on have always pulled over onto sidings to let the more important freight trains pass. The priority on passenger trains in the U.S. is obviously very low whereas in Germany it is very high. Furthermore, the track beds in the U.S. are typically rough and give a bumpy ride whereas in Germany they are clearly maintaining the beds much better and the result is a smooth, comfortable ride. One objective measure of the care the Germans take with the roadbed was that they have apparently replaced all the wooden ties with stable new concrete ones, whereas the U.S. companies are still using wood ties that rot and warp. I found that my (mostly emotional, not rational) comparison of whether to take the car or the train had completely different results in the two countries. In the U.S., I would almost always want to take the car in preference to the train, but in Germany I would almost always want to take the train in preference to a car.

We had been warned in the directions that we had a 20-minute walk to the starting point for our walk, and when we arrived in Neumuenster that turned out to be exactly accurate. The wind was still gusting to the point of occasionally stopping us dead in our tracks or, more unpleasantly, slapping my face with my upturned coat collar—the metal snap fasteners really stung! But we signed up for the walk without incident and started off on an 11-kilometer loop around Neumuenster. The temperature was 40 degrees Fahrenheit and with the wind roughly 20 gusting to 50, the wind chill factor made us keep walking fast to keep warm—we made it back in slightly less than 2 hours, which is a pretty fast pace for us. Along the way we saw a nicely landscaped psychiatric hospital with several buildings, but on top of one of them was clearly an astronomical observatory dome! Your guess is as good as mine on that; the only thing I could come up with was that they had renovated an old scientific research center into the psychiatric hospital and just not bothered to remove the dome on the main building. Otherwise we saw a lot of farms, fields, and trees being blown around by the wind. Did you know that trees creak when the winds blow really hard? That’s a curious thing to hear while you are walking in the forest, and of course you would only hear it when the winds are quite high and the trees have been planted close enough together to rub against each other, which was how they were planted in Germany.

We had our books stamped at the end of the walk and decided to walk back to the train station to try to catch a train north to Schleswig. But by the time we reach the station we had put in about 17 kilometers all together for the day, and my foot was blistering up. I contemplated walking at least 3 kilometers in each direction to get to the Viking Museum in Schleswig, and decided to bag it. It would be hard to enjoy walking around a museum on blistered feet! So it was strike 2 for the Viking Museum, and after buying a couple of Frikadellen for me and a hot dog for Monika we returned to the train station to take the train back to Hamburg. It rained quite hard off and on during the trip back, so maybe we made the right decision, especially as we didn’t catch the bus and had to walk back from the Reinbek station to the house (another 2 kilometers there).

In the afternoon I put my feet up and we relaxed while watching a replay of the Formula 1 Grand Prix race from Malaysia. Michael Schumacher in a Ferrari won the race, which I thought would make Heinke and Gustl happy as he is a German star and they are big fans. The fire I made was also relaxing altho the gusts of wind occasionally would blow a puff of smoke back down the chimney and into the living room. After a few more weeks of this I thought I would become, like some fish, well smoked!