April 21 - Our last Volksmarch in Eckernfoerde

With the weather holding at mild and sunny, we decided to do one last Eckernfoerde walk to get over the 40-kilometer bar to have our books stamped for the event. Taking along some sandwiches, we took our chain of trains up to Kiel where the chain broke. Our train from Hamburg was late and the connecting train to Eckernfoerde had already left. Monika mentioned that it probably could not wait that long because that entire stretch is a single-track span with trains going in both directions every hour and they can pass only at one station in the middle. The curious thing is that this is the one train segment in Germany where we have been late 3 out of 4 times by 5-8 minutes, and I don’t know why. Once when we were late the connecting train waited for us, but on the other two occasions the connecting train was, as Kermit the Muppet put it, “Gone with the Schwinn!” So we had an hour to kill in Kiel and this time we explored the shopping center just to the north of the train station.

This shopping center extended over two city blocks and was, compared to what I typically see in the U.S., medium sized. It is built somewhat on the same basic pattern as the centers in the U.S., being 2 stories high with large central hallways and atria, and anchored by a major department store, Karstadt, on one end. Except for the name on the stores, I could have been at any upscale shopping center in the U.S., but the fact that we were in Germany peeked through here and there. One thing was a curious sculpture in one of the atria. It was one of these mechanical melanges of levers, rolling balls, and lights, but in this case it was crowned by a clock just like those used by the Deutsche Bahn at every train station in the country, and the clock was keeping exact time! The other thing that I think was different due to cultural differences was the composition of the stores in the mall. I saw four big bookstores on our quick walk through and there may have been more underneath where I couldn’t get a good look. That is at least two more than I would expect in a U.S. shopping center of the same size.

We were already having trouble finding space to pack all the German books I had purchased, so altho I was drawn into the bookstores like a fly to honey, I tried desperately not to buy anything. I found an Astrid Lingren book that really looked good, but I decided not to buy it and rationalized that decision by thinking I would try to find an English version. The fact of the matter is that Lingren’s books seem perennially popular in Germany—in one of our walks we even passed by an Astrid Lingren elementary school. But she is definitely not that popular in the U.S. except for the Pipi Longstocking series, which in my opinion are not her most interesting books, and finding her books back in the U.S. is more of a problem.

We hustled back to catch the next train to Eckernfoerde, picking up some Turkish chicken wraps along the way for our first lunch that we ate right after we boarded the train while they were still warm. That gave us the energy to start our walk of route number “1”, in a fine fettle. Route “1” was basically an 11-kilometer loop around the Wyndeby Noor, a large brackish lake that lies just to the west of the central part of Eckernfoerder. Altho the first kilometer and last three kilometers of the walk were on paved sidewalks, the other 7 kilometers were on natural surface paths around the perimeter of the lake and again my feet thanked me for the soft surface. In fact, at several places on the far side of the lake the trail became quite muddy, but we could typically edge around the mud on firmer ground to the left or right, so that was all right. Those sections of the this walk would, however, have been be difficult or impossible for wheelchairs or families with baby carriages, but the instructions gave no inkling of that fact.

The first 3 kilometers of the lakeside trail was one very long nature trail. There must have been around 20 signs that explained about the lake and each type of plant ringing it. Unfortunately, many of the Plexiglas covers had been broken by the local youth, I expect, but many were still legible. The Noor, as it turns out, was caused by the tongue of a glacier carving out a valley during the last Ice Age. As the water level rose after the Ice Age, the sea invaded the Eckernfoerder bay and the Noor area, but ultimately the isthmus between the two was built up enough to completely separate them. To this day, the Noor remains 3 percent salt, which is more than fresh water but less than normal seawater, and apparently enough fish live there to support at least one commercial fishery. A lakeside stand was even selling prepared fish along the trail the day we walked by, but given Monika’s aversion to fish we did not stop to check it out.

We did finally stop at a shelter on the other side of the lake for our second lunch. Since we were in no hurry, we ate leisurely and just watched the birds flying around, of which there were plenty. By this time of the year in northern Germany, all the bushes had already leafed out but most of the deciduous trees were still bare. Monika thought it would be nice to come and see this area in the fall with all the deciduous trees turning their fall colors, and I could certainly agree with that. We did not see sailboats in the Wyndeby Noor, but I did see some nice ones on Eckernfoerder bay and I thought that would be a lot of fun, too.

I was walking rather gingerly the last few kilometers, trying not to aggravate a blister I had bandaged during lunch #2 and in general taking it easy on my feet and legs, which were complaining. So we slowly wended our way back to the Information Center, where we turned in our big green start card (one very long start card is used for all of the walks) and had our books stamped for a total of 44 kilometers. That will probably impress the folks back home if I don’t say anything to destroy the illusion that we did it all on one day! Actually, the walks in Eckernfoerde offered a really nice variety of landscapes in one package and we were happy to have done them. Basically the walk south is mostly woods and views out across the bay, the walk to the north is mostly old town and farmland, the in town walk is just the modern part of town, and the walk around the Wyndeby Noor is a nice around-the-lake walk. There are, of course, 4 other walks we didn’t even get to and those mostly involve longer loops out into the countryside surrounding Eckernfoerde. From what we saw on the train, the surrounding countryside is quite pretty and those walks should be very pleasant if your feet and legs can hold up to the 20+ kilometer distances!

Monika thought the train left at 3:37, so we hustled over to the train station only to find out that the train left at 3:47 and we had 15 minutes to spare. Monika paid the attendant while I signed onto the Internet, quickly read our email, and shot off two more segments of the journal to my kith and kin. We were fortunate to always be able to find a spare USB port on the computers to plug in the virtual disk drive that held our backup files. Very handy, that. The trains back ran like clockwork, but one thing I noticed on this trip was that that the closing doors don’t seem to have a safety mechanism. When you combine Vise-Grip doors with people trying to jump in at the last minute, you have a recipe for squished people, and I saw people really caught in doors two or three times in our train travels in Germany. I can safely say there are no automatic safety releases, so if you ever get over to Germany and are tempted to jump into a train where the doors are closing, think it over carefully before you do that. But after the woman finally was released from the doors (and duly scolded by the conductor!), we zipped home without delay and had dinner (leftover pizza) by 6:30. After our normal TV shows and the news, Monika did a small batch of laundry by hand while I wrote in the journal until it was time for bed.