Bob:

We were both hungry and curious what kind of breakfast was included in our 50 Euro room, so we trotted down to have breakfast right when the buffet opened at 8 a.m. We were served coffee (Monika) and tea (me), and then had our choice of orange juice, soft boiled eggs, fruit, three different cereals with whole milk, yogurt, and luncheon meat, cheese, butter and jam to go on black bread or hard rolls. I would call that a "standard German breakfast", which is far heartier than what most Americans would expect under the label of a "Continental Breakfast" but also better able to sustain a lot of physical activity.

Since it was overcast, we decided our physical activity for the day would be the Volksmarch in Wernigerode. The we drove a very narrow, curving two-lane highway from Braunlage to Wernigerode, and I was relieved to park the car at the parking lot near the train station. Unfortunately, we found out we were parked at the wrong train station and had to fumble our way through the city using the GPS to the main train station that had the starting point for our walk. Once we reached the boutique where the start box was located, we found that the magic words to request the start cards were, "Permanenter Wanderweg". After paying the 3 Euro fee, we started off following the sheet of instructions.

No map was provided, but that wasn't a problem at first because the first major stop on our route was Schloss Wernigerode, a large castle on the bluff overlooking the town (think Disneyland), and that kept us from going too far astray. The narrow streets and beautiful half-timber houses of Wernigerode gave it a rather charming medieval appearance and we enjoyed walking through it immensely. We stopped off at a bakery for some raisin rolls and chewed on those as we worked our way uphill to the castle.

Monika:

Bob:

Schloss Wernigerode had initially started out in the Middle Ages as a true military fortification, but was gradually transformed over the centuries into a palatial residence for the local royalty. Successive generations of local aristocracy had, of course, added onto and modified the basic building until it had become a veritable warren of formal and residential rooms. Although the German Kaiser was deposed after World War I, the German aristocracy had maintained their ownership of all their lands and buildings such as the palace at Wernigerode until after World War II. Since Wenigerode is in the old East Germany section, the Communists had taken over after World War II and converted the palace into a museum. After the reunification of Germany the museum had focused on restoring the palace to its former glory period of the late 1800s. That restoration was pretty much complete by the time of our visit and the castle looked so interesting that we simply couldn't resist taking off a couple of hours to tour it despite having many kilometers yet to walk on our Volksmarch.

The first part of our tour was a guided tour up a gazillion stairs to the top of the tallest tower in the castle. Although the exterior of the tower was thick stone, the stairway inside the tower was a quite rickety wooden staircase that squeaked and groaned rather alarmingly as we all stepped gingerly upwards. I'm not kidding about this, one of the steps was a single plank of wood with a big gap in it through which you could look straight down into nothing, and I decided to step over that one rather than risk my full weight on it. The view at the top was, however, spectacular, or at least it would have been if it had not been an overcast, foggy day. Even so we had a nice look at the city of Wenigerode spread out beneath our feet before we worked our way carefully back down that staircase. On the way down I stopped off to take pictures of the clockworks that drive the big clock on the outside of the tower, which was quite a complex of gears and pulleys and such.

From the heights of the castle we plunged down into the cellars where the local royals had their wine cellar. The guide explained that the cellars were not dungeons and had never been used for incarceration or torture or anything like that, but they were still rather dark and gloomy so we were glad to get back upstairs into the open. The self-guided part of the tour consisted of two well-marked loops through the rooms of the palace, which were exquisitely restored and decorated with the authentic furnishings or reconstructions. Truly beautiful, but at a truly dreadful social cost. Photos were not allowed in the rooms, so we had to settle for a few postcards from the museum shop, where I also found a really good topographic map of the Harz region that even included longitude and latitude lines to coordinate with the GPS. Hooray!

Monika:

Bob:

From the castle we walked through the forest toward the Christianental Gasthof. The autumn colors were mostly yellow with occasional red, and the sensation of walking through a brilliant cloud of yellow was absolutely magical. The trails did not have any markings whatsoever, however, and the instructions were quite cryptic so we ended up getting off the intended path and wandering the trails around the Gasthof for about an hour trying to find the first checkpoint, a white 1 foot square with black lettering. Just as we had given up and repaired to the Gasthof for a belated Mittagessen, we were totally surprised and quite embarrassed to finally locate the checkpoint right on the corner of the Gasthof itself! I was too tired to laugh, but we had a nice light lunch of bean soup and Knockwurst, which is just like an American hotdog only fatter and longer.

From the Gasthaus we descended down a path through a small zoological park that had birds, farm animals, and various other critters in enclosures to either side.

Monika:

Bob:

. We continued back into the town along a well-hidden path that ended right at the foot of a piece of the old city wall. Our instructions told us to walk along the alley at the bottom of the wall, but I noticed folks were walking up on top of it. Since I had never walked on a real medieval city wall in Germany, I opted for climbing the stairs and walking atop it. The promenade on top was quite easy to walk on and we had nice views out over surrounding sections of the city from out vantage point, including a Bier Garten that I was surprised to see was empty despite this being the Oktoberfest season. We continued through a tower in the middle of the wall to its end, where we turned right on the Burgstrasse to head for our next major point of interest, the Liebfrauenkirche (Church of Our Dear Lady).

From there we zigzagged our way through some of the oldest sections of the town and found some remarkably small and quite cute half-timber houses. The narrowness of them and the way they kind of sagged and swayed reminded me both of Old Town Alexandria in Virginia and the old houses in Lauenburg on the Elbe near Hamburg. Here we managed to get lost once again, but backtracked from the old city gate structure to find the sign for checkpoint number 2, which turned out to be sitting in the window of a kiosk on the street!

The Volksmarch route next approached the train station where we had parked our car, and I had the opportunity to film two of the old steam trains as they crossed a nearby intersection. Filming the second train gave me a bit of a jolt, because I had set myself right next to the tracks and leaned against the gatepost to steady myself. Well, the train tracks kind of curved around right toward me, and the visual sensation I got while watching the train steadily become larger and larger in the viewfinder was that it was going to run right over me. I haven't had that exact sensation since a herd of reindeer came careening at me out of control while I was filming them up in Lappland in 1985. In both cases I just held my ground and was fortunate that the train curved away just before it hit me and the reindeer parted around me without hitting me as they stampeded up the street.

Monika:

Bob:

By this time we had been walking for the better part of 6 hours and since we had already walked the stretch from our car to the starting point, we collapsed into the car and drove back to the starting point. Monika took our books in to be stamped, and we drove back to Braunlage using an alternate route through the foothills of the Harz. In fact, I was surprised at just how abruptly the mountains transitioned into almost flat, level ground. We were searching for some kind of good food store to purchase low fat cheese, meat, milk, yogurt, or anything else, for that matter, which we just had not found in Braunlage. Fortunately we found a Lidl store along the way where we were able to purchase all those low fat items except the milk, where we had to settle for 1.5% fat milk. Keeping on my low fat diet can be a pain in the neck. In any case, we arrived back home before dark, ate Abendessen, and then tuned in for the evening news on the Tagesschau. Right after the news was a musical special called "Musik Dampfer" (Music Steamboat), and we kept watching that for the nice musical interludes until it ended at 10 p.m., when we turned in for the night.

Monika: