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DOUBLE DEUTSCH1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Itinerary | Home
Bad Wimpfen isn’t bad at all. In fact, it’s decidedly good, with a 12th-century castle built by the Holy Roman Emperor, crumbling stone walls with longbow slits in which kestrels now nest and the Red Tower, added in 1210, from the top of which we could see grey herons gliding over the Jagst River. My stepson, Erik, and I hopped on our bikes at the town gate and coasted down the hill toward the river, hardly noticing the rain. My thought as I watched Erik disappear over the first hill was that I was glad I wasn’t riding one of the crude wood-and-iron affairs I’d seen the day before at the Kurpfälzisches Museum in Heidelberg. Credited as the first bicycle, the Laufmaschine was invented in Heidelberg by Karl von Drais in 1817 at the height of Germany’s Romantic period, when the ruined castles and forested valleys of this district inspired the dark, brooding poems of Goethe and the heroic music of Carl Maria von Weber. Riders in tight pants straddled its leather-covered seat and scooted over the cobbled streets with their feet. I was happy bespoke tour organizers Butterfield & Robinson had equipped us with custom-made bikes by the Italian firm Pinarello, complete with modern-day pneumatic tires. Nine Tours de France in the last twenty years had been won on Pinarellos, though not by us. Erik had invited me on this 240-kilometre bicycle tour of Germany’s Castle Route – just he and I and the gently rolling (he assured me) German hills. It wouldn’t exactly be gruelling. Five nights in luxury hotels, our gear transported in a van, wine tastings, beer samplings, schnapps sippings. We would be following a system of bicycle paths that wound through Hohenlohe, a region of southern Germany that was mostly dairy-farming country, with quaint half-timbered towns and villages nestled in the valleys beside meandering rivers. Erik runs five kilometres a day and eats only wholesome, organic food. He is lean and fit. I, on the other hand, am not. I play old-timers’ hockey just to prove how unfit I am. I wheeze just tying my skates. Would I be able to keep up? How could we bond if I were always a kilometre behind? “Erik’s father’s from Germany,” my wife, Merilyn, reminded me. Also, Erik had apprenticed as an artist in Berlin for a year. “Maybe he wants to show you that side of himself.” I felt less daunted. One of the things you read is that travel is self-discovery and that shared self-discovery is bonding. I remembered that I used to cycle a lot. I got out my mountain bike and took a couple of exploratory turns around the yard. I could do this. I pictured the two of us pedalling jauntily side by side through the sun-dappled countryside, singing German drinking songs, quoting Goethe (whose motto was “without haste, but without rest”) and talking about what it had been like to suddenly find yourself with a different father and a new son. I called Erik and told him the trip was on. “Cool,” he said. |
