Our trip to Germany and France

Wednesday, we got up to a charming European breakfast (bread, cold cuts, cheese, honey, jam, coffee, tea, orange juice) set for us by our hosts at the bed and breakfast.  They even included two lighted candles! The entire house reminds Jayne so much of the houses in Finland.  We had their bottom floor to ourselves and they stayed on the top floor.  

   

Soon thereafter we walked to the rental car place, only to discover that our reservation was no longer valid.  Barry had set the time at 7 am, but we arrived around 9 and the no longer had our BMW waiting for us.  Still, we were able to rent a very sporty Opal at a lower rate!

We had little trouble getting out of Heidelberg and were soon on our way to Gemmingen, the first stop on our "Germanna Colony" tour.   Jayne's family, as many others in Madison, is descended from the 2^nd Germanna colony that came to Virginia in 1717 to work Governor Spotswood's mines between what is now Culpeper and Fredericksburg.   As soon as their indentures were complete, many moved west and settled in Madison County on what was then the extreme western frontier of America!  

 We were able to visit three of the villages from where those colonists came:  Gemmingen, Schwargern , and Zaberfeld.    We had good google map directions to Gemmingen and we easily found the church there.  The Weavers and Clores came from this village.

 

WE expected to use the GPS to find the other villages.  Unfortunately, that wouldn't work (because the villages are so small?) and we feared we were on a wild goose chase!   Fortunately, we found two very helpful ladies in flower shop who spoke almost no English, but finally decided to lead us around to some village office where there were good maps of the area.

 

Our next stop was Schwargern, the place from which the Wilheit family came. The highlight there was a gorgeous Lutheran Church (the only one that was open to get inside in any of the three villages).   Most of the churches and cemeteries we saw were built (and populated in the case of the cemeteries!) after the Germanna colonists left.  The church in Schwargern was open, ancient, and gorgeous. 

 

 

The other highlight there was a great lunch at a charming German restaurant.   Jayne had a German style pizza with a spatzl-like crust, tomatoes, onions, country ham, and cheese.  Barry had duck sausages with kraut and pumpkin mashed potatoes.  Very good!

  

From there we headed to Zaberfeld the village of the Kafer family.  Another quaint south-German village and a church we could only look into.   There was some troubling graffiti on a bus stop there we noticed.

 

From Zaberfeld we headed toward northern France to the village of Mattstall.    Our GPS found that and suggested the journey was only about 85 kms.   We thought we'd be there in a little over an hour.  Not so!    I think we must have missed a turn because it took us well over two hours to get there.  (Once we looked at a google map when we got back we realized that the GPS took us way too far south.)   The landscape approaching Mattstall from the south wasn't very impressive and we were worried that we had wasted a lot of time for little payoff.   Were we wrong!   Mattstall was absolutely charming.   It was at the end of a one-lane road off a winding two lane road through some small mountains.   The road to the village took us past acres of corn on rolling hills.   Only a few pictures can begin to capture the beauty of Mattstall, and they inadequately.

 

We saw very few people and only spoke to one. He spoke German but Barry was able to make him understand (we think) that an ancestor of mine 8-10 generations back came from that village!  When he told his wife, she said "Wow!"

 

As we got back in the car to return to Heidelberg the GPS suggested an alternative route because of traffic congestion.  We choose the alternative (though it meant we were unable to go to Huffenhardt, the home of the Utz's) and are we glad we did!     The route took us through miles of beautiful countryside with small mountains, rolling hills, field after field of grapes or corn, and absolutely charming villages.   We stopped at a fruit stand outside one town and bought a bag of apples, some grapes, two bottles of wine, and they filled our empty water bottle with "new wine"—think grape cider.

 

We arrived back to Heidelberg just at dark tired but exhilarating.   Later, we tried touring Heidelberg in our rental care but that was useless: the streets are unfamiliar, the map impossible to read in the dark, the road signs confusing, and the GPS uphelpful so we returned the car to the rental office and walked back to the B & B.

 

We had an email from the owner of the B & B asking us what our plans for the next day were.    Barry told him we had a train out of Heidelberg bound for Antwerp at 1 pm and hoped to site see around town in the morning.   The email said he was not working the next day, so Barry asked if he'd like to "show us the town."    He said sure, so just after 9 am we set out in his car (a soon to be 30 year old Audi station wagon).   He drove us to the old section of the city where parked and walked us around for a half hour or so.  

 

From there, he took us to the top of the mountain that overlooks the city where we walked a bit and took some pictures. Then we visited the gardens that are attached to the 12^th century castle at the base of the mountains.  We finished the morning by crossing over the river and going to a little café on a riverboat.  Mr. Lutzmann told us that he got married on that boat!  We enjoyed some coffee and final conversation before he dropped us off at the train station around 12:30.

 

Our itinerary back to Antwerp was a bit different from the one we had taken going to Heidelberg.  We had a short 15 minute jaunt to Mannheim, and then the high speed train to Koln.  From there we switched to another high-speed train to Brussels.   We were not long out of the station until there was an announcement that because of an accident we would have to be diverted and there would be an hour delay in arriving in Brussels.   Some time later there was another announcement that we would, in fact, have to leave the train and take buses which would shuttle us to another station to pick up a train into Brussels.  It turned out that our delay was closer to three hours.

 

Still, it was quite an enjoyable adventure. 

 

Barry:  Jayne and I could not get seats next to one another on the bus.  The lady next to me spoke decent English.   She said she had heard that the reason for our second diversion was because someone had committed suicide by jumping onto the tracks. That was never confirmed.  I enjoyed the half hour or so talking with her.  She is a journalist covering classical music in Europe for a TV channel and several magazines.   Her grandfather was Jewish but converted to Protestant Christianity (in part because of his love for Bach and Mozart).   He had immigrated to Columbia and she was born there.   I told her I had lived in Argentina and from there on out our conversation went back and forth between Spanish and English.  She has a brother who lives in Buenos Aires and she was, of course, familiar with the great Teatro Colon, the famous opera house there (where Jayne and I once attended a concert). 

 

We also spent a great deal of time with a young German woman named Stella who was seated next to us on the train.  She caught Jayne's attention because she was giving advice, in perfect English, to a college student next to her about things to see in Antwerp.  It turns out he was an exchange student from Australia, studying in Mannheim, and was headed to Brussels to meet up with a friend from our ship.   Stella has a Ph. D. in Marine Biology and works for the World Wildlife Federation lobbying the European Union on issues related to fishing.   We greatly enjoyed our time with her.