22 August 2008
Sean named the day Training Day.
We landed as scheduled at Kohn-Bonn airport and after two inquiries, we boarded a train to Koblenz where we were to change trains for Moselkern. I say after two inquiries but it was two inquiries and a one hour delay. Sean and I were standing at the train door which had just closed. By the time I realized I had to push a button, the train rolled away. Sean was more than a little frustrated.
We sat at the terminal and waited one hour. I told him to be at the door and I would be right there with him. We made it onto the train this time. We got off the train in Koblenz, found what we thought was the right train to Moselkern. The platforms were 4 North and 4 South
“South,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“Well, we are wanting to go south.”
A train came along at the appropriate moment, so we boarded.
Sean said, “I think we’re going the wrong way. I don’t recognize any of the towns they’re saying from the list.”
“It does feel like we’re going back the way we’ve come.”
“Hey, it’s an adventure. It doesn’t matter where we end up. We’ll do something wherever we end up.”
“Right,” I agreed. “It doesn’t matter.”
We rode in silence for a few minutes.
“It really does feel wrong,” Sean said.
“I know, but it doesn’t matter,” I said.
“No, it doesn’t matter.”
It was the right way. We got off at Moselkern.
The station was totally unattended. There were no lockers. We were going to put our stuff in lockers and take a 1.5 hour hike to Burg Eltz.
HUNGRY!
We carried our luggage downstairs under the tracks and back up again to find a “main” street. This turned out to be a street wide enough for exactly one car. No room for pedestrians.
We rang a bell at a house. A lady looked out at Sean and shook her head. We walked on but someone answered the door and hailed us.
“Sprechenze English?” I asked.
She shook her head.
I made eating motion with my hands. She pointed down the street.
We ate a wonderful half a roasted chicken each with french fries.
Sean’s German really began to come back to him. He spoke with a girl (of course) of around sixteen. She called a taxi to take us to the Castle and offered to let us leave our bags there. We accepted gladly. (I’m sure there are some readers who will think we were stupid to leave our bags with strangers but…)
The taxi driver was a lady about my age who was really rocking to the music on the radio. She finally turned it down and struck up a conversation with Sean. She dropped us off at the parking lot from where we walked downhill. I wondered how many people they have lost walking down that hill/mountain.
The Castle was cool! I bought a book. Sean took pictures. We got a tour guide who spoke English. He was pretty stern and really hard to understand. Every once in a while he would spread his mouth into a smile that was sudden and short lived. I thought his boss must have told him to smile more and he would suddenly remember.
As we were leaving, Sean asked, “How did you like the castle?”
I found myself swaying on my feet. “Fine, if I don’t fall on my face before I leave it.”
“You too?”
Jet lag had finally caught up with us.
{There was some incident regarding the loss of our entry ticket but Angelica remembered us and I got in. Sean found his ticket. My notes are rather incomprehensible.}
Sean told me that at the age of 56, I did not know how to walk. He complained Michael and I wear ourselves out taking small steps quickly. “Slow down,” he told me, “and think about breathing.”
Going back up that hill was murder on my legs. We finally achieved the parking lot and found the cab. I actually remembered the address of the place we left our bags which we reclaimed and hiked back to the train station. From Moselkern, we went to Cochen were we decided, I should say discovered, that we had to backtrack to Koblenz to get a train to Freiburg changing at Mannheim. Their trains are well synchronized. We get off of one and on to the next.
Sean kept thinking he was going to get to eat but finally had to get a sandwich on the train.
We arrived in Freiburg at 23:30 where we wandered and asked for the hostel for an hour. People were not good at giving directions and we were not good at understanding them. Finally, we so exhausted that we got a hotel room for 120€. It was a beautiful old building. Our room was on what Americans would call the third floor but they called it the second. It had two monster beds and a monster couch. We had showers, excellent beds and ten hours of sleep, barely leaving before getting charged for another day.