Arrival day

I am finally doing the German Camino - Jakobsweg or Saint James way - that I had planned for April 2020. At that point, I had decided to follow a route from a town called Wurzburg, about two hours south east from Frankfurt by train, to Strasbourg in France. It was to be about 21 days walking and to be squeezed in right after classes finished that year. I had booked the plane tickets and started to plan the route. And then all that went kaput, like everything else that year (including the planned and booked Tour de Mont Blanc).

After years of meeting Germans and walking with Germans in Spain and France, this will be my first long walk in Germany. The number of walking routes here, including Jakobswegs, is astounding. I thought I might choose to walk someplace completely different than what I had planned, but it was overwhelming to make a different decision. So while I am here, I will do nine days of the route I had originally planned and then I will take a train and do an eight day route a little further north. I have also never broken a route up before! So radical!

Two relatively easy travel days — Kingston to Montreal to Frankfurt. And then three trains to get to the very pretty Bavarian town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber. Painted, timbered houses, cobbled streets, gold hanging signs over shop doors. I am taking as omens that no one at the airport mentioned my poles (folded up in my pack, which was carry-on), that I got a whole centre row to myself on the plane, that the plane was early enough for me to get a train 90 minutes earlier than the one I had booked, for which I later got many notifications about how its lateness would not allow me to make one of my connections. The only travel glitch - which felt very stressy - happened about 30 minutes before he was coming to pick me up for the train. When I put on my pack to see how much it weighed, I somehow broke the buckle on the waist belt. Safety pins to the rescue, along with an extra buckle E had at home! So far they are all working great!

I spent the afternoon wandering the streets in Rothenburg. Stopped in at the Jakobskirche to get a stamp (but, honestly, I would have forgotten to do so if the woman in the tourist office had not told me that the church was around the corner. ) There’s a very cool modern statue of Santiago beside the main door. And a metal (what kind of metal is it???? ) relief map of the town a few metres away. I spent a long time in a book shop making all the inevitable comparisons to book shops at home (books in other languages, lots of books for studying various things, fantastic map/travel section, etc.). I bought the smallest German-for-second-language-learners book I could find so I’d have something to practice reading. We’ll see how that goes!

Lots of good views from the town walls out over the valley where the Jakobsweg goes. I had excellent goulash soup and a “mixed” salad (a plate with potato salad, carrot salad, and beet salad on top of salad greens) for dinner. That was followed by ice cream and a mint tea in an ice cream and prosecco (!) shop, and I was back in my room by 8 pm and in bed by about 9:30.Read more