Our Walk to Bavaria

So yet we have not given you any updates on the new trail, der hochrhöner, and this will be the only one because we are already finished! We are sitting inside the tent on a camping site in Bad Kissingen.

This trail we have walked 140km and have collected 15 bags of trash. We feel it has been less trash on this trail than the others but we have not counted the “statistics” yet, this we will do when we are finished with Germany. But we did make two big trash-findings! We found a television dumped in one of the wind shelters… we could not carry it with us and also a whole tent, unfortunately we couldn’t use any of its parts either, however we took a picture of it.

After being in Germany for 9 weeks we have seen how the “garbage truck” disposes of the garbage. In Germany you put your trash bag alongside the road and the garbage truck runs by slowly. On the go one of the garbagemen jumps out of the truck and grabs the garbage and throws it in the truck. In Sweden however we put the trash bin by the road and the garbage truck has to stop and empty the bin with a machine. Both strategies sometimes results in trash on the ground, which the garbagemen don’t always pick up since they are often in a hurry.

Around one week back our trash picker broke and we had to improvise. We tried to carve our own trash picker but it lasted only for 5-10 different trash, then we had to sharpen it again. So we threw it away since we had to work extra to get the trash. But a few days later we got interwiewd by a German paper; Main Post – Bad Kissingen (2017-04-29). We asked the reporter if she knew where we could get one. She kindly asked the Mayer for us, but they don’t use them anymore, they are a little bit outdated. But then the reporter told us that she might have one in her storage, she went home and searched for it. Luckily for us she found it and we met up the day after and she gave it to us!

Even if this trail has been a fast one for us, we have experienced a lot! We always come back to the views and the nature, but it is astonishing! We have been on mountains up to 950m (Wasserkuppe). Up at the mountains we have had snow and this has been the first time we ever hiked or put up a tent in the snow, a great experience! One of the days even offered a wide variety of weather; from sunshine and blue skies to hail, rain and snow. As the day went by the weather continued to shift.

This trail has given us everything; mountains, great views, forests, big green fields, nice small towns, really beautiful gardens and a lot of culture! One of the cultural inputs they have on this trail is “Paulus the wanderer” in the Ibengarten, the local Robin Hood. We also learned some Swedish culture on this trail. There are some places named after when Swedish soldiers invaded Germany some hundred years back, for example, Schwedenwall.

Along this trail we came across some places called “wanderhütte”. These were a little bit different than the regular wind shelters. The one we stopped at, at Milseburg was a restaurant without electricity and used a fire stove, really cozy!

Vattie has had great fun on this trail as well; she loved the snow and played a lot even if she did not have the energy for it and she met some donkeys for the first time in her life. They were just as curios as she was. We have also gathered pictures on Vattie on the special “hochrhöner benches” which we thought was a fun side project. We’ve collected all pictures of the benches in a gallery on Vatties page!

Maybe it is because we are more used to it now, but we feel that the hills on Weserbergland-weg were tougher than the mountains on this trail. And in combination with the fantastic views on this one, der hochrhöner beats weserberglands-weg any time. But we think that the route-signs can be improved.

We even had the strength to climb 3 mountains in one day; Hablestein, Milseburg and Wasserkuppe. Even if this was a few days ago now our muscle are still a bit tired, but that means we can enjoy our self a little bit. So we are planning to go to Stuttgart meet up with some friends and hopefully meet new ones on the spring festival!

After this we will start our last hikingtrail in Germany, Westweg Schwartzwald, and we heare there's still snow. Locking forward to that.

All the best from us this week!

Servus!