The Weinsteig Part III Deidesheim to Neustadt a d Weinstreaße and disaster strikes.

We took the S-Bahn from Mannheim to Haßloch (Pfalz) and changed to bus 513 to Deidesheim. If you are tempted to take this route be warned: We had three minutes to get from the platform to the bus stop. We did not hang about and as soon as we sat down the bus was away.  We left Deidesheim station and took the Bahnhofstraße past the fountain in front of the Tourist Information Office. The fountain is worth five minutes of your time. You can take each others' photographs "wearing" bronze clothing and admire the goat with droppings and the mouse without. We picked up the yellow and red waymarkers showing the feeder route to the Weinsteig easily. We turned left at the end of the Bahnhofstraße to reach the Marktplatz, the square in front of the Deidesheimer Hof, a restaurant visited by the great and the good when Helmut Kohl was Federal Chancellor. However the restaurant still serves basic Pfälzer food like live dumplings, Saumagen (stuffed pigs stomach) and sauerkraut at reasonable prices. You can also eat a four course gourmet meal for €66 with a different wine for each course. We put ourselves out of temptation and took the Heumarktstraße on the far side of the town hall following the red and yellow waymakers. We passed the swimming baths and climbed through the vineyards towards the Pfalzblick, a restaurant. Along the way the markers changed colour to the familiar red and white squares. We walked along the edge of the forest overlooking the vineyards before dropping down into Gimmeldingen and then climbing back in to the forest into the Gimmeldingener Valley with its three guest houses. By Forsthaus Benjental, the last one we started the four kilometre up hill hike (300m) to the summit of Weinbiet hill. The path is not good and care was needed. The Pfälzer Wald Verein (Palatinate Forest Club) restaurant was shut. It was Friday and Ruhetag. Once away from the summit the wide smooth path dropped steadily and somewhere along here I tripped over my feet. I fell heavily, cut my knee and bruised my left side. I will take walking poles in future. Judith played the nurse and applied sticking plasters. I hobbled along dribbling blood on my trousers to the stone deer, a carving by whom we don't know.

There is a wet red spot on my right leg.
We climbed down the technically difficult section by Wolfsburg (the exposure is quite fierce) and took another waymarked feeder into Neustadt. We visited an Apotheke - a chemist's shop to buy plasters, a bakers for a cup of coffee and the station to catch the S-Bahn back to Mannheim.
The route is well waymarked and we did not use our guide or our map.

The Weinsteig Part II Bad Dürkheim to Deidesheim

The weather forecast for this morning was not very clear. As the promised fine day yesterday gave us a snow shower and a wind from the Arctic regions, we did not expect any good weather this morning. When I looked out at about 07:30 I saw blue skies and sunshine. I woke Judith up. We breakfasted and drove to the Rhein Neckar Zentrum's car park to take the OEG to Mannheim HBf where we took a Rhein Haardt Bahn train to Bad Dürkheim. The RHB stops in front of  Bad Dürkheim station.  We walked down to the main road, turned left and crossed the road on the corner to walk up the Mannheimer Straße. We had had trouble finding a café when we here last week, but had we walked another 100m along the Mannheimer Straße we would have found half a dozen. We turned left at the Stadtplatz (Town Square) and followed the Weinstraße (Süd). By this time we had picked up the red and yellow markers Weinsteig feeder markers and swung right by the pizza restaurant to climb out of town. The signposting was superb all day. At the end of the tarmac we followed a basalt cobbled road and then turned right towards the Flaggenturm, the tower on your right. We climbed up to this and it wasn't the last climb of the day, The view from the tower was good but hazy. We climbed through the forest before we dropped steeply and then climbed up over another ridge where we had views of Wachenheim. Yet another steep drop to a campsite before we climbed up to the Wachtenburg ruined castle - restaurant and then climbed on for some time before we dropped off the edge of the world to reach Deidesheim. The usual deal once we got there and we lost  the way markers, so wandered round the village in circles until we found the railway station. (Just turn left by the Deidesheimer Hof and turn right down the Bahnhofstraße.) We just missed a train and so had to wait half an hour for the next. We could have taken a bus to Ludwigshafen, I suppose. Train back to Bad Dürkheim and RHB to Mannheim, OEG to Viernheim.

The Oster Valley in the Odenwald, Germany

We left Bensheim by car in carpool and drove up to Reichelsheim. We turned off right by a bakers and climbed the Krautweg to the car park at Teufelstein. We got out the car into a window that came straight from Greenland via Siberia. It was cold. We climbed south and soon found shelter in the woods, thank goodness! We dropped into Unter Ostern, climbed through Rohrbach, Erzbach and Ober-Ostern to then drop to the Zum Ostertal country pub. We ate well and then worked off the lunch by climbing to the heights on the other side of the valley to return to our starting spot. We reckoned we'd walked 17 km by the end. It is possible to go to Reichelsheim even on Sundays by bus from Bensheim and there are return buses in the evening. The journey takes about 50 minutes. Check vrn.de for times.

The Weinsteig Part I Neuleiningen to Bad Dürkheim

The Weinsteig is a new trail that runs parallel to the Weinstraße on the western edge of the Rhine Valley from Neuleiningen near Grünstadt  to Wissembourg just over the border in France . It is a little more strenuous than the older Weinstraße trail.  We intended to walk the Weinsteig on cold clear days this winter, not in one fell swoop but on individual days.  We had just two days this winter which were not half bad when we walked the Weinstraße trail from Bad Bergszabern to Wissembourg to prepare a tour for a Mannheim club. Unfortunately the weather this winter was mainly wet and cold. so we have had to wait  for spring to start the walks.
We took public transport to the start and had a sense of an older more romantic Europe on Mannheim Hauptbahnhof (main station) when we saw the Copenhagen - Basel CityNightLine train with a sleeping car from Moscow. When the carriage left Moscow I am not too sure. In my early days as a commuter from Weinheim to Frankfurt I used to regularly see the Zürich - Moscow sleeper that  stopped in Weinheim with its coke stove heated Russian carriages three times a week. I always wanted to climb on board and drink tea from the samovar.
We took  less romantic regional trains and then a bus from Grünstadt up to Neuleiningen and walked into the village clustered around the partly ruined castle. It seems to be home to an amazing number of architects' houses and offices. We had the usual problem: The lack of signs. Any sign whether Weinsteig, Weinstraße, Drei Burgen (Three Castles)… all lead the same way. There are plenty of good looking pubs in the village. We dropped off the edge of the village and went through Neuleiningen Tal (valley) which is in the valley and then climbed up to Battenberg. The Weinstraße Trail went off to the left before the climb up to Battenberg became serious and so we only had three sets of markers, the red and white Weinsteig sign, a Pfalzer Waldverein sign consisting of a white and a blue horizontal strip and the  Drei Burgen to follow. We wandered off to the right to look at the Blitzrohren - tubes of iron oxides originally laid down horizontally and then shifted vertically as the rift valley was formed. 

We followed a track through the forest slight up and down but climbing all the time. Hill walking is different to cycling. When cycling one looks for short steep climbs where one can push, but not for long followed by a long gentle descent, whereas walkers prefer the reverse.
We visited the Bismark Tower, wandered past the Celtic wall and descended very steeply past the Roman quarry with its ancient graffiti to arrive on the outer edges of Bad Dürkheim. We found our way in to the centre of the town, more by good luck that judgement and found a café to eat the celebratory cake. There were few signs.
The next problem we faced was how we got out of the town, but enquired of a native and managed to find the tram station by the DB railway station to head for home.

Self-guided Walking Holidays in Germany

We visited the Mannheim Travel Fair early in the new year and picked a brochure from Kleins Wanderreisen. The company offers self-guided tours with luggage transfer all over Germany. Their website is partly in English. We have booked a walk through the southern Black Forest gorges later in the year. I am impressed by their attention to detail. There is a Stadtfest, i.e. a jolly event but obviously fairly noisy in one of the villages we are due to visit. We were duly asked whether we were prepared to stay overnight there or did we wish to have two nights in one of the adjacent villages with taxi or bus transfer. We will report later about our experience.

A cold day in the Odenwald

Our cycle club in the form of the section where we were formerly members: Allgemeiner Deutscher Fahrradclub Kreis Bergstraße organises excellent walks every winter. Today we met in Bensheim and went by car up to Neunkirchen, a hamlet in the Odenwald. We set up carpools to cut down the environmental impact. In Neunkirchen we walked through knee deep snow over the Germannshöhe via Freiheit (Freedom) to the hamlet of Winterkasten. We ate well in the Raupenstein Guesthouse and then set off along the local road to climb through sticky rather unpleasant snow over Raupenstein Hill. We followed the border between Heppenheim and Bensheim through a the forest on an unmarked way. Fortunately the snow was deep enough that we could follow the tracks of others. From Schleichenhöhe we followed the red square route to the foot of the Kaiserturm, before turning off left to skirt the Neunkirchener Höhe and reach Neunkirchen once more. We had the obligatory Kaffee und Kuchen in the Höhenhaus restaurant, before returning to Bensheim. A four hour 14 km walk with about 400 m climbing and several million calories. An excellent day.

Bad Bergzabern to Wissembourg

The "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like" fountain in Bad Bergzabern

On an earlier attempt the weather was much clearer.

Meanwhile we haven't got too far with our winter walking aim of doing the Weinsteig Trail along the W edge of the Rhine Valley 10 to 14 km sections at a time - the weather has mostly just been too nasty and unsettled. However yesterday buoyed falsely by the weather forecast - cloudy, cold but mostly dry - we headed out by local train to Bad Bergzabern, a wine growing centre and spa towards the southern end of the Weinstraße. 

The stylised bunch of green grapes waymarks the trail.

As one does we've promised to lead a group from our cycling club on 17th March, along this section. As the time does go faster apparently or more slowly somehow we were beginning to run out of days when we could take another dry run at this - looming up are dentist visits, museum trips, other walks, retirement parties, visiting friends recovering from hospital and all the other activities that take time, and that is even before one of us has laid a foot in the garden apart from taking the compost out. Clearly the weather gods over in Rheinland Pfalz had not received yesterday's SW Germany's weather forecast since it was snowing almost the whole day with a wind direct from the Urals, but calling on the spirits of Shackleton and Shipton we marched on, meeting just one youth and a rather roly poly sausage dog underway. We ate our sandwiches rather quickly, sheltering behind a log pile and then hastening through some blasted vines (surely these withered sprouts will never produce Riesling, as the notices proclaimed) and then into the shelter of the woods where great fallen trees rubbed against other branches with unearthly squeaks. A buzzard flew silently past and later a kestrel hovered yards away and then swooped on a tiny mouse, enough for a few minutes of tearing apart on the fence post across the fields.
We had climbed through vineyards and forest to Dörrenbach,  dropped through Oberrotterbach and climbed to a ridge before we had a our first view of the the Weintor. It was probably one of the coldest walks I've ever done, though neither of us was ever cold for more than a few minutes, well protected by high tech layers as we were. We reached Wissembourg, just over the French border, following the wine route to its close on the German side via the Weintor, a totally pointless and brutalist style gateway, built in the time of the late, unlamented NS.
Rather than walk down the footpath by the side of the main road from Schweigen into Wissembourg, we turned off right by the large restaurant by the roundabout south of the Weintor. There we discovered a whole set of small vintners and interesting looking family style hotels and eateries - mostly closed for the winter.   Five minutes later we crossed the French border on foot, reached the outer suburbs of Wissembourg after two kilometres, climbed over the remains of the earth ramparts into town past the protestant church. We wandered into town past a house where Charles de Foucauld, a French mystic and missionary amongst the Touregs in Algeria had spent his early years and also past a house formerly belonging to the Bartholdi family. One member of this family was Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi who designed the Statue of Liberty. Interestingly enough there are plaques on various houses with information about them in French, German and English. The French appear to receive the most information, the Germans somewhat less and the British very little. Maybe the city fathers of Wissembourg think  English speakers are less than interested in European history.
In Wissembourg too some of our favourite watering holes were closed but promising to reopen before March 17th, when we may indulge in cafe au lait and mille feuilles after we have guided the walking cyclists to this paradise for pastry freaks (These delights are not available in Viernheim, fortunately).  We had time to nip into a supermarket to buy some cheese and then we took the train home. A good day.