April 25 - From Ratzeburg to Moelln

The day dawned mild and sunny, so we decided to complete the Moelln-Ratzeburg Volksmarch by walking the 15-kilometer segment from Ratzeburg back to Moelln. We took the chain of trains up to Ratzeburg where we hoped to catch a bus to the market place or the Youth Hostel that was our start point. But most of the bus routes didn’t run on Sundays—the only one that would get us to the market place did not leave for another 50 minutes! We considered walking until we checked the map at the information center at the Ratzeburg Bahnhof and found that it was at least three kilometers to the Youth Hostel. That wouldn’t have been a consideration if we hadn’t had a 15-kilometer stretch staring us in the face. I figured that if we walked those extra three kilometers my feet would be sorry by the end of the day, so I looked around for an alternative and saw a taxicab sitting just outside the Bahnhof. Monika must have been thinking along the same lines because she readily agreed with the idea and we jumped into the cab.

The drive down to the Youth Hostel cost 5.30 Euro, but it took only 10 minutes because there was very little traffic on the streets on a Sunday morning. This time we found the proprietor and she cheerfully stamped out books on the appropriate places so we could start our walk. The first segment was around the eastern shore of the pretty lake to the south of Ratzeburg (there is another, larger lake to the north of the town). A couple of fishermen were already out on the calm, blue waters of the lake, which made a great picture in the bright sunshine under the clear blue sky. We met a lot of people out walking on this really fine Sunday morning, which would have surprised me in the U.S. but did not surprise me any more in Germany. Walking just for fun and even doing “Wanderungs” seems to be a ubiquitous part of the German culture.

From the south shore of the lake we turned off the lakeside path to dive straight into the forest for a while and then jog over to pass an old water mill that had been converted into a restaurant. That was our second control point for the walk. The proprietor was setting up for lunch but was happy to take the time to stamp our books. The restaurant was really nestled in the woods and looked nice enough that I thought I would like to go back and have a meal there some time. As it was not yet time for Mittagessen, we continued on our route south past a very small village and back into the woods.

The wooded sections of this walk were just sublime. The sunshine streamed thru the tall, dark fir trees and lit up the path in front of us as brightly as the yellow brick road in the “Wizard of Oz”. We just kept marching along and watching for the signs for route “4” plus the self-control points with two digit numbers. For the self-control points we had to stop and jot down the number in the back of our booklets, but that also gave us an occasional breather. Ever now and then we walked past fields were the first hay had been cut, and in one field the hay rolls had been so neatly aligned across the field that it looked like nothing so much as a huge snake!

Our route kind of zigzagged back south to Moelln and finally passed by the 1813 soldiers’ graveyard that we had seen on the segment from Moelln out to Ratzeburg. As we came down from the wooded bluff into the city we again had the 100 or so steps, but this time we were going downhill so they were no problem. We cut straight thru the city and just downhill from the church with the statue of Til Eulenspiegel in front we found several restaurants with luncheon specials, so we stopped to eat a bit before finishing the walk.

We both had the daily special, Schnitzel mit Bratkartoffeln (Breaded pork steak with fried potatoes), that appealed to us, and the weather was so mild that we decided to eat in the outdoor sidewalk section. That was where I discovered why dining al fresco is so popular in Germany—it avoids most of the cigarette smoke of the other diners! Two women a couple of tables away were chain-smoking, but we didn’t smell a thing, which was wonderful. Is that why everyone in Europe is so hot to eat outdoors? In any case I was very happy to do without that soupcon of second-hand tobacco smoke. With nothing to dim my appetite I ate all of my lunch and, as often happened, the rest of Monika’s. Surprisingly, after resting a bit and eating a lot, I was still feeling relatively fresh after all this. It was the first time while we were in Germany that I really felt I would have enjoyed doing another 5 kilometers. So finally at the end of our trip I was getting in condition for 20-kilometer hikes!

We returned to the sundries store at the Bahnhof to get our books stamped, but we decided to hold onto them for the (likely) eventuality that we would come back to this part of Germany and continue doing the Moelln walks. Up to this point we had walked 3 complete walks of the Moelln year-round-event totaling 58 kilometers, but there were at least 8 more walks with around 100 kilometers to go, so we kept our instruction and record books in the hopes of another visit. We were just in time to catch the train from Moelln to Buechen, Buechen to Aumuehle, and Aumuehle to Reinbek, and there we even found a 236 bus waiting for us at the train station!

Shuttled back almost to our front door, we immediately turned on the TV to catch the last part of the San Marino Formula 1 Grand Prix race, which was won by Michael Schumacher in a Ferrari. Then we got down to serious packing, as in “Where in the world are we going to put all this stuff?” I was taking home all of the new Cool Max clothing we had purchased, of course, and as many of the new tool sets as I could stuff into our luggage. Monika also had her new clothing plus Louise Luebeck, bags of chocolate eggs, bars of chocolate, bags of licorice—well, you get the idea. We also wanted to take home the decorative plates we had earned on our walks in Schleswig and Soerup that were currently adorning the fireplace chimney as well as odds and ends that we had just accumulated somehow. I think this happens to most folks who travel, but certainly the longer we stay somewhere the more we tend to accumulate and there is a limit to what can be fit into the luggage for the trip back.