Day 2 Schrozberg to Langenburg, 19 km

Another very un-Camino-like breakfast. Three kinds of bread. 4 kinds of cheese. Lots of butter. Good coffee. And we were encouraged to make sandwiches for lunch with the leftovers. The white rolls were shaped like scallop shells for the pilgrims. Cute.

I walked all day with Angelika. The other two women walk slower than we do but do not dawdle. So they ended up a ways ahead of us. Our last stop in town was at a gas station after a man came out and yelled across the street to us: Do you want a stamp? We did. Our first stop after leaving Schrozberg was in the middle of a wet field when I saw that Erich - a German man I had walked with on the chemin from Le Puy to St Jean in 2015 (I think) - had tried to call me. I called him back, and then Angelika did the talking, and we all made plans for him and his wife to come meet us in the afternoon. I had written to him last week and was a bit nervous about how we might work in a visit. But it was so easy!

The walking itself was uneventful today. But lots of nice moments. The stand selling pumpkins and other squash at the side of the road (with signs giving tasting notes for the different squash!). Another table later on with walnuts. A covered table and round bench that had been built with a lot of tiny details in the wood. We met the man whose son and grandson built it. They are both carpenters. The grandson had done a traditional 3 year and one day stint as a “wandering journeyman,” a medieval tradition that you can still follow in some trades. If you look up “wandering journeymen,” Wikipedia will tell you all about it and show you photos of clothes they wear. The grandson had also learned to build cabins from logs in Canada and indeed there was a small one right behind us.

By the time we finished chatting with the man (by which I mean that I mostly listened and Angelika talked with him; I could not understand a word he said ), it was drizzling a bit. We passed lots of good rest stops but it was a bit too wet to stop moving . Only one village today, and there was no cafe. It was clear there had once been two. We had our lunch in a very large covered bus shelter that had a little book exchange cabin, which I forgot to take a picture of. And then we went back out to more woods and fields and eventually a wind farm. At some point in the middle of the wind farm, we heard from Erich and sent him a screen shot of the map. Less than an hour later he was standing on the side of the path waiting for us.

So fun to see him. My German, such as it is, is better than his English and we managed some conversation. This evening he is going to go do a workshop new pilgrims on ways to use your smart phone on the Camino- I assume he was going to be teaching them about using map apps, but I could be wrong.

Three days in and I finally got kaffee und kuchen. Plum kuchen that was worth the wait. After that Christa and Erich went home, and Anjelica and I went to the places we are staying. I am staying is at Metzgerei und Pension Wolz. A metzgerei is a butcher. I assumed that the name meant that the pension was in an old building that used to have a butcher shop in it. Apparently that is true, but the not so long ago butcher was the uncle of the man who now runs the pension with his wife. And the younger man, in addition to the pension and whatever his other day job is, does butchering for local farmers in the evenings and on the weekends. And you can buy the things that he makes from a vending machine outside the building. And beside the vending machine, you can see a picture of him, with his family alongside him, winning an award for his work.

It was a two castle day. One in Schrozburg and one here. The one here is well know (closed by the time I got to it) and is somehow related to the relatives of the now departed Queen.

Langenburg is a pretty village with few services. No supermarket or pharmacy. Three restaurants: Vietnamese, Italian and Italian. There is a dining room in the place where Angelika is staying, and if it were open it would serve local food, but it’s not open. We chose Italian place #2. It was ok. But it was not until the end of the meal, which was not expensive, but certainly was not cheap either, that the guy told us, oh, we only take cash. We both managed to find enough - but don’t you tell people that when they walk in? And then we noticed, after we left that the one ATM on the street was not working!

An easy day with wet feet that has ended in a small super clean room with a working radiator!Read more