Onward to Germany!<\/p>\n
Our first stop was Winningen, a small town on the Moselle River just outside of Koblenz.\u00a0 We arrived there on Friday<\/strong>, after a stop in Antwerp, intended as a lunchtime stop, only moderately out-of-the-way but an opportunity for the kids to have visited another country.\u00a0 We didn\u2019t see an awful lot in Antwerp, but parked just outside the city center, visited the impressive cathedral, ate doners for lunch, and continued on our way \u2013 and got trapped in rush hour\/construction traffic.<\/p>\n The cathedral is really quite nice.\u00a0 Two noteworthy aspects to it:\u00a0 first, its history, having been built in the thirteenth century, then severely damaged by fire and rebuilt, then looted by Calvinists during the reformation, retaken by Catholics and re-furnished (with, then, multiple Rubens paintings), then looted by French revolutionaries (because the city was then part of France) and slated to be demolished but saved by bureaucrats who either stalled for time or just weren\u2019t competent enough to get the demolition started (I wasn\u2019t sure which) before the government changed again.\u00a0 Second, the cathedral did charge a modest admission charge and presented itself as a tourist attraction, but in both the printed materials, and with the way the cathedral was laid out, there was a continual invitation to prayer \u2013 and it was a Holy Door; the door itself was a side entrance that led to a section of the cathedral specially set aside for the purpose and, as we passed by after having toured and eaten lunch, we were invited in and invited to confession with an English-speaking (Indian) priest.<\/p>\n Our detour, however, meant that we arrived in Winningen with time to do little other than have a late dinner and settle in.\u00a0 The town itself, though, is cute as a button.\u00a0 Really, with half-timbered houses, and stone houses, and narrow streets, and grape vines all along the hillside and even on sides of houses and on trellises above the streets.\u00a0 It\u2019s so cute you just want to pinch yourself.\u00a0 There are, I think I read somewhere, 3,000 inhabitants, and it has a fair number of restaurants and two bakeries and a small mom-and-pop type shop, but the larger grocery stores are all one town over.<\/p>\n Saturday<\/strong> we decided to combine a hike in the surrounding vineyard area, in the morning, with a drive over to Koblenz in the afternoon.\u00a0 As it happens, Koblenz isn\u2019t a particularly remarkable town (it was bombed severely in the war and much of it was rebuilt fairly utilitarianly) but it is the site of the \u201cDeutsches Eck,\u201d a German patriotic monument from the time of unification, with a giant Kaiser Wilhelm, and, along the riverfront, all the Koblenzers were holding their equivalent to neighborhood garage sales, with people selling things at tables lined up.\u00a0 I thought at first that the wares might have been antiques or other interesting items, but, no, it was just the same sort of \u201cone man\u2019s trash is another man\u2019s treasure\u201d as at a typical American garage sale.<\/p>\n Sunday<\/strong> started with church.\u00a0 In a reversal from the typical Bavarian town, rather than the Catholic church at the center and a Lutheran church as an afterthought, here it\u2019s the Lutheran church at the town center \u2013 a circa 1200 building which became Lutheran when the town did, during the Reformation \u2013 and the relatively newer Catholic church at the edge of town (though everything is relative \u2013 the town hasn\u2019t grown much, and \u201crelatively newer\u201d means built in the 1850s).\u00a0 To a degree more extreme than I\u2019d seen elsewhere, mass was the province of the elderly; we were the only family, and really there was only one other person under age 60 or so.\u00a0 Perhaps, since this was a combined parish with multiple other towns, the families attend elsewhere, or perhaps Winningen is itself relatively old in its population, or, most likely, it\u2019s just a matter of families simply not attending mass or even identifying as Catholics.<\/p>\n Anyway, afterwards we went to a site that doesn\u2019t appear in typical tourist guides:\u00a0 the museum of the government bunkers.\u00a0 The Rhine River valley is not far from Bonn, and just north of Koblenz is a mountainy, or at least hilly area, so when the government was looking about for a site for their bunkers, they settled on a 16 km stretch of tunnel, intended for a railroad line but never used for that purpose.\u00a0 During World War II it was used as an underground munitions factory, then abandoned again.<\/p>\n The original bunkers were huge \u2013 space for 3,000 people to live and work for 30 days in the case of a nuclear attack, including the top levels of government and other officials, with serious amounts of concrete protecting the complex, and doors able to close automatically in 10 seconds.\u00a0 We saw a decontamination room, the chancellor\u2019s bedroom (distinguished from all the other sleeping quarters only by the fact that there was one standard-issue army bed rather than 4 sets of bunk beds), a war room with the magnet map and magnets for planning troop movements (as if there would be any troops left in the case of World War III, but I suppose the idea was that the government would take refuge there in the case of a threat of nuclear attack even if Soviet troops moved in in a conventional war).\u00a0 We saw storage rooms, a clinic with an operation room, and a room with TV cameras for the chancellor-in-hiding to use in giving talks to the German people.\u00a0 And we saw a communications room.\u00a0 The tour guide asked the tour group whether anyone came from the local towns, and then asked that local to describe the town \u2013 small, rural \u2013 and tell the group what the area code was and how many towns shared the area code.\u00a0 Turns out, a very small area had this area code because the largest number of the associated phone numbers were those of the bunker complex, and that local had never known this.\u00a0 (Now, there are many more area codes, and they vary in length \u2013 large cities have two digits, smaller regions have four \u2013 so it\u2019s not quite the same as it would be in the US but it\u2019s still an indicator of the magnitude of the complex.)<\/p>\n All this was intended to be top secret, but you won\u2019t be surprised to learn that the STASI knew everything about it.\u00a0 Some materials suggested that the government tried to turn a bug into a feature by considering that, if the Reds new about it, they likewise knew about their seriousness in fighting back in the case of an attack.\u00a0 Here\u2019s a funny little tidbit:\u00a0 the museum is run by volunteers from the community who continue to research its history.\u00a0 Much of the details are locked away as classified information \u2013 but researchers discovered that they could uncover its history, for instance the particulars of the NATO exercises, by going to the STASI files, which have been fully opened to the public.<\/p>\n The complex was in active use until the end of the Cold War, with biennial military exercises involving all of NATO from 1966 until 1987, but the bunkers, and their furnishings and their technology were never updated.\u00a0 After the Cold War, shockingly, in 1997, the government made the decision that they no longer needed the complex, and further decided that it should be wholly demolished, and returned to its original, empty-tunnel state, and the demolition work was nearly wholly complete when they agreed in 2001 to create a museum out of the final, undemolished bit; hence, many of the rooms were recreations of the originals, previously in other locations in the complex.<\/p>\n Way, way cool, and when we get all our pictures loaded on at home I will upload these to share with readers.<\/p>\n So that was Sunday.<\/p>\n Monday<\/strong> was Mosel Valley day.\u00a0 In the morning, we toured Burg Eltz.\u00a0 The Rick Steeves guidebook cites this as his favorite castle in all of Europe (this guidebook is unlike any I\u2019ve used before \u2013 it\u2019s very selective and opinionated, and written in the first person as if from Rick Steeves himself, though it\u2019s not clear how much is his opinions vs. that of the various contributors within his Empire), and, indeed, for its type it was pretty good \u2013 \u201cits type\u201d being, not a palace like Neuschwanstein, but a true fortress, in the hands of the same noble family as when it was founded.\u00a0 The tour only covered a small portion of the castle, as seems to always be the case, but the rooms were very interesting, and the story that there were three branches to the family, each with their own part of the castle, and one common room where they met to sort out their disagreements.<\/p>\n We ate lunch at the castle caf\u00e9\/cafeteria, with the usual assortment of wurst, then continued on to a small town to walk around and climb to a castle ruin for a panoramic view, then to an indoor pool to relax for a while to end the day.<\/p>\n Tuesday<\/strong> was Trier, to see such Roman monuments as the Porta Nigra (the remaining city gate), the cathedral (the oldest part of which was initiated by Constantine himself, and which houses the \u201cHoly Robe\u201d brought back from the Holy Land by Helena herself), the imperial basilica (originally the imperial palace, then, after multiple uses, now a Lutheran church), and the amphitheater, each of which have various superlatives (\u201coldest in Germany\/outside Rome\/etc.) attached to them.\u00a0 (Lesson learned:\u00a0 we got the Saver Card, which covers admission to two sites and the museum, and, in hindsight, would have chosen the Imperial Baths over the Amphitheater, both because the latter is a further walk than we had thought, and because there\u2019s not really that much to see.)\u00a0\u00a0 We also looked at the Archeological Museum, though annoyingly the most interesting section and the main draw, was closed off.\u00a0 Grrr.\u00a0 We then took a 15 minute detour to drive into Luxembourg, just because, got off the highway at the first exit and walked around the first town.\u00a0 Turns out it was fairly quiet \u2013 oddly quiet, with all the shops closed and the restaurants, seemingly sparse even in the town center, very quiet.\u00a0 So we turned around and came home, rather than having dinner there as we had originally thought.<\/p>\n Wednesday<\/strong> was Rhine Valley day.\u00a0 We started with a Rhine cruise, that is, one hour from Bacharach to St. Goar, then an immediate return \u2013 which was pleasant and scenic, and, happily not too warm, not too cold.\u00a0 We then wandered around Bacharach, with a hike along a part of the partially-surviving city walls.\u00a0 Rick Steeves\u2019 opinions are starting to grate on me, but his recommendation of the town as nice to walk around was a good one, thought the restaurant listed among his recommendations was a disappointment.<\/p>\n We then, at the end of the afternoon, drove the few minutes up to St. Goar to the Rheinfels castle ruin.\u00a0 Originally a huge castle, it survived the maurading French who destroyed so many castles in the late 1600s, withstanding a siege, but then, after ultimately surrendering to the French, was destroyed in the aftermath of the French revolution by the revolutionary army.\u00a0 What remains, though, is still substantial, and, unlike the typical castle experience, you don\u2019t need a tour but are just given a map and the opportunity to explore, including various underground tunnels which require flashlights (Rick Steeves warned us to take a flashlight, so we did \u2013 that is, my\u00a0 son\u2019s flashlight \u2013 but the light was dim and supplemented by the iPhone flashlights).\u00a0 This was a huge, huge hit with the kids, who kept saying, \u201cthey\u2019d never let you do this in the United States!\u201d<\/p>\n So that was Winningen, which, in addition to being cute as a button, was also fairly central, with easy access to the Mosel and the Rhine, and a reasonable drive to Trier (1 hour, 15 minutes) because it\u2019s close to the highway.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Onward to Germany! Our first stop was Winningen, a small town on the Moselle River just outside of Koblenz.\u00a0 We arrived there on Friday, after a stop in Antwerp, intended as a lunchtime stop, only moderately out-of-the-way but an opportunity for the kids to have visited another country.\u00a0 We didn\u2019t see an awful lot in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[415],"class_list":["post-4788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-vacation-2016"],"yoast_head":"\n