lake garda or watership down

After returning to Lake Como turned out to be rather a wash (more on this later), H and I decamped to the shores of Lake Garda (Gardasee, Lago di Garda and known in antiquity as Benaco where Roman forces defeated the Alamanni confederation—whose name is lent to the French and Spanish exonyms for Germany although Deutschland is Germania in Italian).
We chose a nice site on a south-western peninsula of the lake called Manerba del Garda—pleasantly peopled but not over-crowded since high-season was over but yet not too cold for a dip in the water. This region in general has been a sheltered one—eons before the tourist crunch, due to its climate and is the most northerly clime for citrus orchards, particularly lemon trees but not neglecting wine and olives, and the fact that many structures have foundations that reach into pre-history and neolithic times is probably a reliable indicator of the weather. The silhouette of La Rocca greeted us every morning, framed dramatically by welling clouds and though perhaps not the highest cliff on the lake, it was certainly the closest.
The old town centre rising up on a hill more inland was something to behold as well, but what we found to be the most delightful accent to the peninsula demarcating just one protected cove was the Isola San Biagio.
Separated from the main beach by barely a shin’s depth of water, one could walk to the little island along a path of pebbles to discover (though privately-owned, entrance just seemed to be not brining in outside beverages or dogs and maybe a visit to the snack-bar) free range bunnies (conigli). They were everywhere—tame and underfoot like the growing flock of ducks that visited every morning just in time for breakfast.
The rabbits appeared among the tents later on as well. Perhaps this reserve had origins as stock for a private hunt—which happily does not seem to be customary any longer, but makes me think rather on the origins of Manerba, which is believed to have been founded round a grove sacred to the goddess Minerva—the patroness of the hunt and harvest and other virtues besides. This Etruscan avatar of Athena overlaps what is properly the bailiwick of Artemis but there was a lot of cross-over for champions and I wonder if the keeping of bunnies did not reach back that far and into mythology as well.

man was in the forest

Untamed, the water flees from human encroachment.

hiatus or ciao bella

We at PfRC have only had the chance to take one grand vacation this year—which we’re forever grateful for knowing that most do with a lot less and thankful too that this is an anomaly and not a worrisome trend, but happily we will have the chance to return to the Italian Lake District in a few days and returned from further adventures we will be refreshed and ready for more. In the meantime, you can visit our friends over at the Smörgåsblog or consult our extensive archives. Arrivederci!

palisade-park or load-bearing

This nice little appreciation of the iconic stave church of Borgund in Norway from Twisted Sifter reminded us of our visit there a few years ago. Of course the natural beauty of that country is nonpareil with whatever man-made constructs can frame it. It was truly a wonderful and privileged experience and we are hoping to be back and astounded again one of these days pretty soon.

rennsteig oder überquerte

Over the weekend, H and I took an albeit short but rejuvenating camping excursion to the Rennsteig—ridge-trekking—National Park in the highland of the forests of Thüringen.
Normally, we’ve blasted past this area on our way towards Leipzig and Saxony, although we’ve taken a few occasions to visit the promontory castle the Wartburg and a few other locations in the region beforehand, tunnelling through the mountains in one of the longest enclosed stretches of Autobahn that goes through the mountains in Germany—whereas only the passes were navigable before this engineering project.

This time, however, we paused at the head of the trail in a conservatory called Hohe Sonne to take a hike through the so-called Drachenschluct—the dragons’ gorge, a narrow path that winds through the rocky outcroppings that tower above. It was only an infinitesimally small fraction of the trails through the woods that link up with the international path from the Balkans to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, the pilgrimage route of Saint James (Jakob).
Afterwards, we toured around some of the villages, which were pretty distinctive places, within the park and visited the ruins of a fortress above the Werra valley known as Brandenburg, whose campus represents on the largest keeps in Middle Germany. It was fun to imagine what it might have been like intact.
Slowly we made our way back to the campsite we had found hugging the little lake (See) of Altenburg, just south of Eisenach and the entrance to the park. It was relaxing to finally get settled and sleep out-of-doors, even if it was only for the night and we aren’t exactly roughing it. The next day, we had a late start but we were still able to do a little exploring with the balance of Sunday and drove to Gotha.
This city, birthplace not only of many the royal houses of Europe and the commercial, services-sector boom that followed the Industrial Revelation—spinning straw into gold, as it were, with insurance and finance, was a beautiful but surprisingly quiet place—the sort of quiet that I am sure is not altogether constant or pervasive but tends to go, subdued, with those places whose history needs to be studied and teased out.
Below the patio of Schloss Freidenstein, one of the largest Baroque compounds of Europe and residence for the dukes of Saxe-Gotha, cascading down to the market square and the ancient Rathaus is a water-feature, whose fanciness is testimony to the water supply problems that the city in almost the geographic centre of Germany and the point nemo of any natural sources for plumbing.   A canal was dug of some twenty-five kilometres to form an aqueduct to channel fresh water into the city—surely not a feat to be memorialised by Roman standards but certainly a reminder of how much was lost in terms of the civilising arts when Rome went away—and allowed the city to thrive

5x5

gom jabbar: The Guardian features a tribute to the Aquarian coming of Age science fiction masterpiece Dune, fifty years on and examines its legacy, via Super Punch

our castle and our keep: exquisite off-the-grid motor home converts to an enchanted castle at rest, via the enchanting Nag on the Lake

all work and no play: free to download 1998 board game based on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining

o double-good: a look into the recent incorporation of milk as a staple food, via Neatorama

mathmagic land: dividing one by nine-hundred-ninety-nine quattuodecillion—nearly infinity—spits out the Fibonacci sequence

uAwg oder plus-ones

Preparations for the upcoming G-7 summit are putting undo onus on residents, by-standers and potential antagonists for the selected venue, the alpine retreat of Schloss Elmau. For the sake of security theatre, the compound—which was ironically envisioned at the behest of a local countess back in 1914 as an artistic retreat where an international class of volunteers matriculated annually to cater to and learn from artists in residence and not the exclusive and now fortified hotel that it has become. Campers are disappointed to find many pitches off-limits and other accommodations already claimed by authorities or members of the press that claimed any vacancies months prior.
Traffic is restricted as well as taking one’s cows to pasture. Protesters are unable to vent their frustrations because, ostensibly intimidated by the police, they’ve been afforded no quarter. I hope a few demonstrators do seek through the cordon, disguised as horses or haystacks—not so there’s violence or chaos, but just so the make-believe atmosphere created for the overlords is not so flawless as to allow them to keep their delusions. What do you think? I hope this kind of caravan never comes to town.

innocents abroad oder entlang der neckartal

For the long-weekend, though a bit wary of weather that appeared a little dodgy, we decided to stay relatively close to home and visited a portion of the Neckar river valley, going along portions of the tour that Mark Twain helped to retain their character and inchoate charm in his travelogue of Europe on a steam-powered pilgrimage to the Holy Land called The Innocents Abroad —though I’d argue that the area does so despite this notoriety.
Although H and I quite fancy ourselves sophisticates, we saw and learned quite a lot that we thought—between the two of us, we were familiar with.
The spare pair of days really telescoped themselves well to feel like a fully-fledged vacation just after we left the Autobahn at a curious place called Bad Wimpfen, with its medieval watch tower dominating the one-time imperial city of half-timbered (Fachwerk) buildings.
The market and spa town that grew up on the edge of the Roman world, the Odenwald Limes, was swapped between Frankonia, Hessen, Greater Hesse, Baden, Würrtemberg-Baden and then finally the modern state of Baden-Würrtemberg after it lost its imperial immediacy that meant that Bad Wimpfen was a city-state.
Afterwards, we took a leisurely drive, hugging close to the Neckar, between high cliffs, alternately thickly forested or cultivated as vineyards. For all the scenic beauty of the valley, it was strange that one could only capture it from on high—in sweeping vistas. H and I climbed next to Burg Guttenberg in Haβmersheim (I remember this because quite soon, the names of places veered decidedly less creative—all called Neckar- this or that—and kind of ran together) with its imposing late Middle Ages fortifications. The peasants were preparing for a jousting display but when such festivities weren’t underway, the castle was known as a regional centre for falconry.
Burg Guttenberg was on the opposite bank of the Neckar, facing Burg Horneck, a castle of the Teutonic Knights and just a little further on we came to the impeccably preserved playground called Burg Hornburg above the village of Neckarzimmern. The park consisted of a wine-cellars, hotel (where Twain stayed) and restaurant, naturally—and the estate has been in the same noble family for many generations, the friendly attendant and sommelier addressing another gentleman who stopped by as “Herr Baron”—but also an impressive ruin to explore and climb higher and higher.
We found a campsite in a nearby village of Binau right on the banks of the river.
 It was a nice place to rest for the evening but—and I suppose no one wants this in their backyard, seeing the nuclear power plant (Atomkraftwerk, AKW) Obrigheim just in the distance was a little off-putting. The next day, we cruised further along the river, past Neckargerach and Zwingenburg, and on to the small town of Eberbach with its massive cathedral set against the highest summits of the Odenwald. Another place mentioned in the whistle-stop tour was Burg Hirschhorn, another well-preserved castle with a playground.  Next, H and I visited the village of Neckarsteinach.


 This heavily fortified and guarded town on one of the most formerly strategic and contested bends of the river is the southern-most projection of Hessen, and today forms quite the picturesque spot.
Four castles (die Vierburgenstadt as its known) cling to the ridges above the river valley and on the promenade, we were able to frame three of them in one shot. We camped between Neckargemünd and the outskirts of Heidelberg—probably Twain’s most celebrated destination but one which we’d both knew quite well and worth a future trip of its own.
The next day we passed through the storied city and quit the path following the Neckar to tour the palatial grounds of the massive gardens of Schwetzingen, nestled between the branches of the river.
The summer residence of the court of the Palatinate Electors, the rococo architecture and landscape is the German kingdom’s version of Versailles.
Even if the weather had held, it was maybe a little too ambitious to hope to cover all of the garden, with its resplendent sculpture, hedge mazes, menageries and architectural follies—including this “mosque,” there was too much to see in one afternoon. We could see the rain clouds advancing and hurried back to Lady. We’ll come back to see more one day soon, and some day perhaps repeat Mark Twain’s whole grand tour, making it our own.

hitch and bight

Laughing Squid features a splendidly executed teaching diagram of various knots and their application. The infographic, writ large at the link, is from the design studios of Fix and is called Tying the Knot. The expression “hanging on to the bitter end” and derivations like ‘til the bitter end is from rope tying terminology, referring to the working end of the rope, the length being worked and specifically secured to a bitt—the metal block on a pier. The opposite section of rope that’s not the anchor is called the standing end. I got the merit badge, I think, but I am not sure if I am the best visual learner when it comes to this skill and probably would need some hands-on instruction.

bivouac oder boofen

One of my favourite blogs, Nag on the Lake, directs our attention to a website devoted to treading lightly and minimizing our footprint and range called Living in a Shoe Box. It looks like there are quite a few interesting ideas here but the one that caught our attention—though Lady faces no completion—featured this bicycle mounted trailer called the Wide-Path Camper. Conceived by designer Mads Johansen, this folding, modular unit—no bigger than one of those bicycle-hitch strollers—boasts quite a bit space and comfort and would be perfect for exploring the her native Denmark and much further a-field.

jack and jenny

Camping at the end of the travel season in Normandy, H and I had a little fright late one night at a campgrounds that we had nearly to ourselves. There was an awful clanging of a metal trash bin from over by the restroom building.

H peered out the window to investigate and saw these long and lumbering shadows. In this empty place, it would have been too much to bear had I not mentioned that there was a pair of donkeys corralled at the far end of the camp, which was set back from the coast by just a few grassy dunes and shared the land with a golf range—which looked tended but was also sleepy and deserted. The donkeys had escaped and were conducting the nightly rounds. Reading this article from Modern Farmer about the virtues of these sentinels and their advantages over traditional guard animals made me remember how gingerly we tried to shoo them away from the Bulli—in case they did get spooked and decide to kick a big dent in the side of the bus. Apparently, we needn’t have worried about that.

hashtag hastings

The gadfly Today I Found Out has a teasingly enticing brief about how the realms and domains—real estate—of Merry Old England has remained in essentially the same hands for nearly a thousand years, beginning with the Norman conquest of England. The landed-gentry have a very interesting history starting in October of 1066 when William II, Duke of Normandy recognised a crisis of succession and a power-vacuum that left the isle of the Anglo-Saxons vulnerable and invaded after the native rivals heralding from Denmark and Norway had tired each other out. The Normans themselves were not of French but rather of Viking extraction, invited by the Carolingian rulers some one hundred fifty years earlier to settle along the northern coast in exchange for allegiance and protection against other Norse clans marauding the seas.  This was an old Roman tactic, with many integrated tribes maintaining buffer zones across the Empire’s frontiers.
Over the intervening generation, Norman and English rulers became bound through a few strategic marriages, but Duke William II’s claim was not without contest. The conquest, cemented by the decisive Battle of Hastings, chiefly resulted in the displacement of the native English aristocracy for Norman elites but preserved other institutions and government structure—the peasant-class just knew that they were exchanging one master for another. Chattel slavery in the British Isles was abolished under William, which may have mustered popular local support, but that custom, though there were no longer raids and people delivered as property, was transmuted into other sorts of bondage, with feudalism and serfdom. Those classes of servitude incidentally do not behold lady and master to take care of said possession. The ousted English aristocrats staged a few uprisings but never again managed to regain a foothold in their homeland, though the population remained overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon with only a few thousand Norman settlers as overlords, meet the new boss—same as the old boss. Dispossessed, many of the former landowners fled to Ireland, the Nordic countries, and interestingly to Byzantium, where they joined the ranks of the elite Varangian Guard—akin to the Praetorians of the West, bodyguards to the Emperor. These events and cultural shifts are well documented in both the Domesday Book, a survey and census of all the households in this newly-acquired kingdom, and in the Bayeux Tapestry, the later of which H and I are excited to be visiting again soon, equipped with thoughts about the spread and advance of this society.

ta-ra-ra boom-de-ay

I certainly hope there is not another massive volcanic eruption in Iceland that will disrupt air-transportation, like in years past.
There is little solace in such disasters, even when far away from civilisation, but it turned out to be a big consolation for us when Eyjafjallajökull (pronounced Kajagoogoo in my head) erupted, and anticipating endless problems with flying, it inspired us to get Old Lady. The volcano in question this time is called Bárðarbunga, which is easier to say and sounds pretty melodious too. It wouldn’t sound really that close to “cowabunga,” owing to the th- sound—which entered American English as the trademark greeting of Chief Thunderthud on the Howdy Doody Show in the 1950s.

croatia week

More on what we did for our summer vacation is coming with reflections on travels in Istria and along the Dalmatian coast. Više doći.

sretan put!

 

PfRC will be taking another sabbatical soon, so stay tuned to our little travel blog for continuing adventures. Zbogom!

italy week: renaissance men

Here are some more images and impression from what we did for our summer vacation (the first installment): though I know intellectually that there is little to no elbow room in the lands of Italy when it comes to historic and cultural significance and the locations of important events and the famous and infamous sons and daughters of the towns and villages have to hail from somewhere, I was pleased and surprised to come to the village of Vinci, a little settlement amongst the groves of ancient silver-leaved olive trees and craggy vineyards where Chianti is produced.
It was here that one of the world's most influential individuals, regarded with the due awe of super-genius, was born in 1452 and baptized (though out of wedlock, his sire was no dead-beat dad) as Leonardo da Vinci. We toured the church and later the birth house (Casa Natale) and the town was regaled with icons of da Vinci's creativity and endless curiosity.
Another leg of our adventures brought us to a nearby village where literary figure Giovanni Boccaccio retired (and also was possibly born) after finishing his seminal work, the Decameron—a story within a story, like 1001 Arabian Nights or the Canterbury Tales, a century earlier in 1353 called Certaldo Alto. The Decameron is a collection of a hundred fables exchanged by ten companions who fled plague-ridden Florence during the height of the Black Death. In this fictional, though semi-autobiographical work, the refugees, waiting for the sickness to pass were holed up in an abandoned villa on the outskirts of the city.
After we settled in at our final campsite in Tuscany, until next time, we discovered that the village of Fiesole, with a breath-taking view of the metropolis of Florence sprawling below, was Boccaccio's setting. A compact but complete conurbation in itself, people have been escaping the city for the hills for centuries—including Frank Lloyd-Wright, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and other expatriates, Fiesole enjoyed city-rights and even was a rival to Florence below.
Not having known beforehand, we could speculate on which of the many fine and ancient villas that inspired the author. There was an open field just up the hill from the camp-grounds, known for its unique veins of marble with a bluish-grey hue, and another luminous individual in the person of Leonardo himself visited that field and experimented with his flying machine. Da Vinci, though never discouraged, apparently made wider forays into all disciplines, and though errors were recorded as well as something visionary—he did not bother disclosing his studies that he felt did not further the arts or sciences. I wonder what other connections we stumbled over without even noticing.

ciào bella

PfRC will be taking an extended sabbatical soon for adventures in Ligûria and Toscana.

Here is a composite view of the villages of Cinque Terre, clinging to the shores of the Mediterranean. Did you know that Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms is considered to have introduced the word ciao to English and subsequently to other language where it was not already common-parlance? The greeting can mean both hello and goodbye—like aloha or saalam or shalom or namaste—and has roots in the Venetian saying “I am your slave,” like the German greeting Servus—I am at your service. There are apparently several other meanings and innuendo that the word can convey and perhaps we will be educated. Please switch the station to our little travel blog for on-going adventures.  Arrivederci!

kurhessen oder gloria, viktoria, the doctor is in

In the northern German state of Lower Saxony (Nieder- sachsen), there is an ancient village where the rivers Fulda, Weser and Werra come together and at the confluence, there is a little island and on that little island we set up camp while exploring the area. The town is called Hannoversch Münden, for its historic ties to the city and kingdom and mostly abbreviated as Hann. Münden to distinguish it from the neighbouring Minden (the site of a pivotal battle of the Sever Years' War and names-sake of the HMS Minden where Francis Scott Key was held prisoner when he was inspired to compose the US national anthem), which refers to the mouths of the two rivers coming together; the city of Koblenz further west where the Rhine and Moselle converge is a corruption of the Latin ad...confluentes.
We saw some pretty neat sites in the region, including the Bergpark at Wilhelms- höhe—more to come on that soon, whose palace was temporarily renamed Napoleonshöhe in honour of the conquering emperor’s family when his brother Jérôme was created King of Westphalia (and a defeated Napoleon III was later imprisoned there after the Franco-Prussian War), but the half-timbered homes and wall of the village on the banks of these important waterways was especially enchanting. There was certainly an abundance of culture and history besides associated with Hann. Münden, but one of its more infamous sons really came across as a curiosity: Doctor Johann Andreas Eisenbarth, an itinerant snake-oil salesman who ingratiated himself amongst the ruling families. This quack from Baroque times, however—with no formal accreditation and probably peddled more harmful elixir than helped, did demonstrate a singular talent with self-promotion and advertising, setting the industry-standard for wonder tonics and giving pharmaceuticals memorably made-up names.
The village has embraced Dr. Eisenbarth, ridiculed for his outrageous claims and confidence in folk-songs (who could make the blind to walk and the lame to see—Gloria, Viktoria, widewidewitt juchheirassa!), with quite a few monuments and even consulting hours during the summer for those tourists who might benefit from procedures a step above leeches.

genossenschaft oder working-class hero

H and I took a weekend trip to the town of Delitzsch, not far from Leipzig, and while it was a very casual, relaxing trip and we even stayed indoors, rather than caravaning (it was a curious feeling to be in a hotel) , and took in some of the sites (the Altstadt was well preserved and dominated in close-quarters, the entire town surrounded by a moat with this high defensive tower and Baroque palace built as a retirement home for dowager-princesses and later used as a women’s correctional facility), there are certain quirks of history that have shaped this region, which are not always apparent by what has been curated.
Though always rich in natural resources, arable land and industrious people, it was not until the Saxon province was ceded to the Prussian empire by a mandate of the Congress of Vienna that administratively recreated Europe after the defeat of the armies of Napoleon.
Production, which formerly had not risen above the levels of cottage-industries, were suddenly objects of interest for Prussian robber-barons (the entrepreneurial geniuses who ended the Chinese monopoly on china through sheer determination and alchemy and the manufacture of textile and the growing of tobacco and sundry became more and more organised. Of course, wage, life-style and handicraft itself became diluted in the process. In response, a generation, some forty years into this new relationship native son Hermann Schultze (nee Schultze-Delitzch) founded many charitable organisations to look after the families who found themselves conscripted into this corporate entity, including hospitals and survivors' pensions—however, his most enduring and helpful establishment was a concept now known as the credit-union, a financial institution by and for its members. Such organic means were invaluable ways for workers to better understand the environment that they had become part of, and I wonder if going forward, similar community institutions by trial and error might prove instructive.