Heading rapidly north along the Rhine and posting this from friends near Bonn – 380km these past four days in at times ferocious but just-survivable heat (the beer helps…) – we rather enjoyed visiting the city of Worms, to smile at the double meaning, in English if not in German, of a Diet of the same.
Touches of that wonderful spoof on history from an English perspective, 1066 And All That, the Diet of Worms was of course nothing to do with food, but Diet as in Parliament (Bundestag in German, not Diät) and Worms as in the city, one of the oldest in the former Holy Roman Empire, where Luther was summoned in 1521 to forsake his challenge to Rome.
He very famously didn’t – Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders, he is said to have replied, Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise – and the huge mural in central Worms featured at the top of this post (more clearly on the right), captures a moment when the world turned, from the old era to what can be seen now as the beginning of modern times.
I wonder whether the Ukraine invasion will prove a similar turning point – perhaps one has to hope in the direction of the global community finally recognising that fighting wars and claiming territory is vastly less important than working together to prepare for the climate catastrophe that’s bearing down upon us all.
Anyway, I digress – and had promised not to wang on again about how doomed we all are.
The ride from Annette and Robert in Wackershofen to here in Siegburg and Jutta’s childhood friend Reiner (and wife Barbara) took us down the Neckar river through Heidelberg (totally awash with tourists, and we were glad to move on), and up through Mannheim/Ludwigshafen on the Rhine to a hotel overnight in central Worms.
(Goodness me, along the way the chemical giant BASF proved a VERY large enterprise, occupying multiple kilometres of the Rhine’s left bank).
From there and north through Koblenz, we pedalled, still on the left (Western) bank, into the castle-bestrewn (we quickly lost count of how many) middle section of the Rhine which having curved its way past the treacherous rocks of the Lorelei (both above the river and mid-stream) finally flattens out into Bonn and Cologne.
Daisy has been seriously behaving herself this past week, especially since we discovered, pausing at a campsite before Heidelberg, that a set of torx screws (star-shaped and no, I didn’t know till now what they were called either) holding the Rohloff 14-gear hub together were all just a bit and equally loose.
Easily tightened, ending a constant grinding/creaking noise that Daisy had been generating for a good few thousand km now, and now delivering us a ride that – road surface depending – is Rolls-Royce in its silence.
Oh yes, and before I add my usual set of illustrative, story-telling photographs, an observation that riding 100km a day does after all do wonders for the physical fitness and the waistline.
And for the back, compromised before we set off by so many years of EMDR sat at a computer.
We are both indeed feeling fitter, with our respective 73 and 72 years, than for really quite a while now (at least since we tandemed the length of New Zealand in 2016), and home in just over a week, we’re going to miss this way of living like crazy.
Though we’re not done yet. Tomorrow Wednesday we sally forth, or perhaps I should say Caroline forth for she with Rene is our next friends-port-of-call in Dutch Breda, towards Hoek of Holland, along the Rhine all the way to the North Sea ready for a Saturday ferry and back to English soil.
Where I’m already dreading the lack of cycle paths, and the misery of post-Brexit British politics.
Photos have captions which might be worth reading as well… And again, unusually, I’ll arrange them full-fat from the beginning rather than in gallery form.
