Tag Archives: Germany

The Joy of Ex….pectation

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Or….More Vorfreude and less Schadenfreude

Rose recently alerted us to a new concept coming out of the world of psychology, an area of life of which we are both not unaware, if also somewhat cynical of. Rather wonderfully, given the destination of our upcoming wander, the term he introduced into our shared lexicon was a German term ‘Vorfreude‘ or ‘the anticipation of joy’.

Apparently, winding ourselves up into a frenzy of expectation regarding our Black Forest adventure is actually of great benefit to our mental health. There is certainly no doubt about it, we are both in a state of increasing vorfreude as our start date looms. Personally, I am so vorfreuden I am fit to burst, or as the Germans would put it: sehrvielenvorfreudenburstmachen. (Put it in google translate, the word actually works).

According to one of the experts quoted in the Gurniad article discovered by Rose, people often feel joy and excitement when planning a trip, thinking about going on a date or anticipating a special meal. Well all those things are true of us. Although Rose is not the most eagerly anticipated date night companion, as well as the trip I shall be discovering the joy of turning 65 during our wander, and Rose has promised me a special Geburtstagsessen. So two out of three ain’t bad.

Apparently, looking forward to something increases the pleasure of the event itself. So we are actually having two wanders: one imaginary, the other real. The article lists 30 ‘zero-effort’ ways to fill our lives with joy. Not so sure about the zero effort bit though. We recently had a look at the gradients on our forthcoming wander….and the gym is far from the zero effort recommended by the Gurniad. Nonetheless, pouring over maps, tracing routes in highlighter pen and imagining experiencing the multiple wellness treats provided by the Black Forest hotels seems to fit the bill nicely. Very sehrvielenvorfreudenburstmachenwellness.

Among the other vorfreuden tricks listed we will most certainly engage in are savouring the moment (check), treating ourselves (check), scheduling movement (very much a check), looking for natural wonders (check), throwing a party (check, see earlier comment regarding Geburtstagsessen) and enjoying getting ready for bed (check, post wander exhaustion really helps here). There are a few duds though including meal planning, a daily poem and going to the library, none of which seem to fit into our rugged wander existence.

However, FUTURE ALERT, ‘putting plans in writing’ and ‘keeping a joy journal’ are right up there, despite worries about potential joy journal messiness. We have been much taken with recent Facebook postings by friends @DouglasThompson and @PaulWheble on their respective wanders. We will be doing similar. Please follow @WanderingMan for daily posts on the wander and delve into our very own daily Joy Journal, or as the Germans would say, “sehrvielenvorfreudenburstmachentäglichjoyjournal“.

Mappa Muddli Part I

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As regular readers of these think pieces will know, our wanders can sometimes head off on unexpected paths. Hardly surprising, in that on two occasions we have actually set off ‘sans maps’. In Nepal, we even arrived back at our start point to buy a map and guidebook to read on the flight home. You know, so we could see where we had been.

Some basic insights seem well overdue. For example, that maps are designed to guide your way. That they include information on roads, paths, buildings, contours and so on. Amazingly, maps are orientated north/south, allowing the map reader to position themselves with reference to where the sun rises and sets. You cannot get lost with a map. Can you?

In 2017, we took possession of a failsafe electronic navigation device, the Garmin. Weighing slightly less than a standard house brick, plus auxiliary battery pack, the Garmin doubled our Nepalese backpack tonnage. Furthermore, the electronic map we installed was woefully inadequate. Nepal does not possess (or at least the Garmin version of Nepal) a serious set of Ordnance Survey maps. It got us out of trouble just the once. The map we bought in Kathmandu on the way home was much better and lighter, even if somewhat late for our purposes.

But this time, we are heading off to one of the most developed countries in the world. Surely, mapping would have been brought to the very peak of sophistication by the methodologically minded germans. We went looking.

Indeed, our proposition is true. Germany has a network of fabulous maps. But (there is always one of those, isn’t there), identifying the correct map, and then finding somewhere to sell one to you is quite another thing altogether. Stanfords Map Shop in London didn’t list one remotely likely option. Another UK shop looked more hopeful. The dilemma was less identification than selection. There was no way to figure out which map we needed. So, we took a punt and ordered what we thought was the right one.

Sadly, a miss. Perhaps more of a maybe than a miss, but definitely not a hit. If we had been walking a few miles to the west it would have been ideal. But we were not, and it was not. Happily, a wonderful French company came good, and we ordered the next easterly version of the Kompass Map series and hit the bullseye. Baiersbronn, our start and finish point, sat squarely in the middle of our new purchase.

So now, like an expert carpenter, we had the right tool. A lightweight, accurate and relevant means to find our way around the Black Forest. What could go wrong? What indeed.

To be continued……

One finger, one thumb, one arm, one leg, one nod of the head, keep moving

All of the wanders outlined in these blogs have presented multiple challenges. One might imagine that route finding in the Black Forest would be somewhat more simple than wandering around the poorly mapped hinterlands of Nepal or Rwanda. To be confirmed or not once we get there. We actually have a map this time. A real one. With impossible to replicate folds. The full package.

Happily, we also seem to have overcome the vagaries of booking dot…really, albeit Rose did initially book one accommodation venue for the right day but the wrong year. There is though, a further trial ahead. Mix five years aging with lockdown inactivity and a soupcon of decrepitude and the finely honed bodies of our last wander are but a distant memory. Yes, we are not the men we used to be.

Wandering man and Rose have taken different paths to feebleness, one more prosaic, the other quite exotic. In the case of Wandering Man, the relentless but somewhat predictable advance of arthritis has led to periods of enforced inactivity interspersed with the insertion of spectacular bits of metal into the spine. Quietly confident, after the resulting disappearance of neurological claudication, i.e. the ability to feel his feet again, there remains only the wobbly knee syndrome and muscular atrophy to conquer. Plus of course the maintenance of heart health which observant readers will be well aware prompted these wanders in the first place.

Rose, however, does it differently. In a colourful list of ailments to have assailed him since our last wander, he lists an eyelid tic (the insect variety, not the behavioural disorder), a bout of Dengue Fever and a broken Achilles tendon. All of these infirmities have been a consequence of toxic encounters with other members of the animal kingdom. Even the Achilles issue came about as Rose sought to release an elongated, limbless, carnivorous reptile of the suborder Serpentes – a snake to you and me – that had become tangled in some netting covering a well in Rose’s garden. 

Apparently there are wolves in the Black Forest, so on current form Rose will probably experience some other anatomical malfunction consequent upon a close encounter of the Canis lupus lupus form.

Predictably, we have taken different approaches to regaining lost youthful vigour. Wandering man has joined two gyms and now undertakes grim exercises with intimidating names such as ‘front squat with dumbbell’, ‘deadlift’, ‘press on flat bench’ and the hideous ‘alternating sled push/pull’. Rose, on the other hand goes for walks on the beach. And it’s a lovely beach, with sand and waves and no gym music. Absolutely no gym music. Whilst Rose listens to the gentle crash of waves and observes the ocean, Wandering man endures thumping bass and watches the TV to learn all about food he is not allowed to eat from the cooking programmes taunting him above the gym machines.

Because dieting is, of course, the other ‘regime’. Enforced inactivity and French cuisine have taken their toll. Years of natural selection have allowed the average French person to tolerate morning pastries, extensive two-hour lunches, rich sauces, and fine wines. No such luck for the average Anglo Saxon like Wandering man, who balloons at the mere mention of the word Cassoulet. As for Rose, he is in a better position in finding hot climates incompatible with eating food. It also helps that he spends hours round the garden, pursuing his chickens who give him the right run around. Whereas most people take the dogs out, it’s the chickens that take Rose for walks.

So here we are, trying to lose weight and put on muscle mass in a vain attempt to rediscover the elixir of our lost youths. How our newly rejuvenated mid-sixties bodies will cope with the first incline, we wait to see. The wander we have planned is called ‘Lakes and Mountains’. Lakes sounds OK, it’s the mountains bit that sends shivers down our spines. What’s left of them anyway.

Booking….dot….”really”?

The Black Forest is both pristine nature and a playground for the rich and idle. Or at least the moderately well off with a bit of time on their hands. Actually, it is a place for the economically distressed and permanently frazzled. Like parents of young children. Or academics.

Consequently, nestling in the valleys below the mountains are many, many alpine style hotels designed to accommodate hordes of people seeking respite from the German industrial complex. They have names like ‘Flair’ Hotel, ‘Wellness’ Hotel, or ‘Luxus Landhaus’. Some of them look like towering apartment blocks, others alpine chalets that have grown too big for their foundations. There are simply hundreds of them. 

Choice paralysis. How could Rose and WM possibly make a decision? What were to be our criteria?

Number one emerged early. An informant of ours had warned us that the German definition of a twin-bedded room included two single beds securely fastened together by six-inch nails into a double bed. Individual duvets or not, Rose and WM did not fancy waking up in an inadvertent embrace. The German’s cultural endorsement of naturism and nudity did not apply to us. We are British, after all. Anyway, Rose does not like beards. 

So, it meant we were looking for two roomed places. Or a bed and a sofa. Or a bed and a kennel for Rose.

Secondly, we had to find places at the end of our walk stages. We quickly discovered that some of the endpoints were essentially no more than sheep pounds. Call us old and decrepit, (yeah, go on, we know it’s true) but we did decide one of the key criteria was a place with an actual roof. This meant at times we needed to look a little further away from the hiking endpoints.

Enter Booking.com.

One of the world’s most widely used hotel booking sites, booking.com, provides a handy feature whereby you put in a town/village/road name, and it gives you suitable properties either in the town/village/road or nearby. Allegedly. 

We quickly discovered a number of significant flaws to this apparently foolproof system. More Booking.really? than booking.yeah! The biggest flaw was that much of the area of the Black Forest we were wandering through came under the urban parish of ‘Baiersbronn’, which was not only our starting point but the postal area of several of the other section endpoints. Most of the hotels we identified ended up being back where we started from. Having planned to wander around 18km a day, we did not really fancy wandering back again just to get a bed for the night.

Our solution was to use the ‘View on Map’ feature in Bookin.really? which at least showed us where the potential guest house was compared to our endpoint. However, another big problem immediately emerged. Almost all the hotels, particularly the small cosy looking ones, were full on the dates we wanted them (fully booked up by October 2023, over seven months from our May 2024 wandering dates). Some did not take people for single nights. We felt inexorably pushed towards the big pantechnicons of pleasure. Hello Flair and Wellness!

Our first foray into booking.really? looked promising. We booked a nice medium sized place right at the beginning of the walk. Unfortunately, the next day we received a message to say that we – yes us, Rose and WM, not them – needed to cancel the booking because the owners were selling up at the end of the year and did not know what was going to happen thereafter. One wonders what would have happened if we had missed the message. Presumably we would have turned up to find the place locked up or turned into an aquarium.

Although there were plenty of other missteps along the way, our final criteria was absolutely inviolate. We had to have bears, preferably of the soft toy variety. No soft toy bears, no booking. Here is one we found earlier…..

Stirrings and Wirings

What with a global pestilence, and given that Rose and Wanderingman live in different continents, opportunities to perambulate have occurred with vanishing frequency during the 2020s. One futile attempt in 2022 resulted in no more than a 4km wheezy clomp around a French hillside before Rose was confined to barracks. A catastrophic series of multiple quarantine periods followed.

The year 2023 seemed potentially more auspicious, until Wanderingman fell victim to the surgeon’s knife, albeit one that brought feeling back to his feet and promise in the hills. A brief discussion, and the idea was mooted for a 2024 wander. But where?

A Spanish fly was planned – Rose and Co were to be feted at a wedding in Andalusia, with time to spare afterwards. An idea germinated. Something closer to home? Dave and Ann in France live not too far from pristine wandercountry. The Baltics perhaps or somewhere nearer to the centre of Europe?

What about Germany?

Great idea! Just a slight problem with the language……