Saturday 9 November 2019

Europe Diagonal: Rheinland-Pfalz

I was now on the Saar-Rhein-Weg, another completely unknown German hiking trail. Although the area and the route was quite nice, I was unfortunately passing through on a week-end - and parallel to the trail was a little stream and a narrow winding road where dozens of loud motorbikes were cruising along ... When I approached a village I heard hunting horns and stumbled upon a village fair. The local horn group was playing, I rewarded myself with Blackforest cake and even chatted with some other tourists who admitted of having heard from me on TV ...

But this was going to be a long day ... When I came closer to my planned camping area I passed this lovely village pond. It was already so late that no other swimmers were around. Despite the road right next to the beach I stripped down and skinny dipped. Some locals watched me from afar but I was just happy to be clean again which cannot be said about the beach which was full of goose shit ... The closer I came to my camping forest the louder I heard music in the distance. I already started panicking because it would be hard to fall asleep with an open air concert nearby. But the music source turned out to be tractor and a trailer full of kids who were celebrating  God knows what. And they were moving - slowly but steadily away from me and the nice flat spot in the forest where I finally settled down.

The Pfälzer Wald was a nice area but alas without any cell phone reception at all. I decided to make a short detour into France again and went shopping in Wissembourg. Next I had to overcome a big obstacle: the river Rhine which was problematic, because there are not too many bridges crossing it. I followed the Rhine bike trail to the Rhine ferry where I was passed by hundreds of cyclists who shot me pitiful looks. I hiked more than 40 km that day because walking on flat bike paths was dead easy and the ferry ride did take less than 10 minutes! I could already see the Black forest looming on the horizon once I had crossed the river!

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