The plaque near the gate says "Schloss Broich - Sitz der Herren von Broich. Wichtige Befestigung am Ruhrübergang des Hellwegs". There's a museum there and of course I have the booklet about it. There was an info sheet about the Vikings coming this far up the Ruhr and being stopped, but there were no copies I could have. From the parapet we were allowed out on to we could see the excavation of the original castle. There was a ford across the Ruhr there and this castle guarded the crossing. The castle has been modernized more than once over the centuries and the steep banks around it have been "tamed". Now it's surrounded by city, a major road cuts it off from the area that was once palace gardens, and a bridge replaces the ford.

      I knew from the picture it was up on a hill. I couldn't see it from the bus stop, but I had seen the "to the castle" sign as I came in on the bus, so I knew which way to start. I started. After while I could see the castle in the distance. I took its picture. There were deer behind the fence, pears lying all over the ground. Do deer like pears? I wondered. I trudged on for a while . It didn't look much closer. Eventually I was most of the way up the hill(at least it wasn't so steep any more) but still hadn't reached the entrance. Aha! Parked cars! And there was a gate up ahead. After circling the whole castle, I found the actual main entrance a few steps from where I'd come through a gate and gone straight instead of looking around. I do that when I'm tired. I had also forgotten that they would have come down and picked me up if I had called from the bus stop, although about halfway up I had half-remembered that. I even had the phone number in my notebook.

      It's a lovely place, full of old furniture and dark wood in public rooms on each floor, of which I took many pictures. My room is up on the third floor, down a hall with beams slanting across it and old baby cribs and other things along the way. My room is small but lovely and I have a view out into the courtyard below. After I unpacked, I took my notebook down to write up the day's events and ordered my supper and a glass of wine in the courtyard. Both were delicious.
      Monday had been warmer than I really liked for hiking, but great for taking pictures, in the course of which I managed to lose my camera case somewhere along the line. Tuesday it was gray, windy, and getting ready to rain. I wasn't carrying my pack and wanted to look for my camera case on the way down to the town, where I hoped to mail some things and maybe find some things to eat and drink on the long and complicated train journey coming up on Wednesday. I managed to take a few more pictures before the rain actually began, and it wasn't heavy as I hiked down the hill looking for my camera case. I tossed some pears in through the fence for the deer and picked up one that had fallen without apparently bruising itself to possibly eat myself. No camera case; it had probably fallen out in Ansbach. I took the wrong street for the bus stop, so I didn't get a downhill time figured out, but I was seriously considering taking a taxi to Ansbach anyway. The Verkehrsamt didn't have any historical information on the area, but I did get a hiking map, not that I really intended to go any further. I found the Post in a grocery store and stocked up on travel provisions. I had gone to an Imbiss I thought looked interesting, but the door was locked; not open for lunch, apparently. It was still raining, now even harder. The bus shelter had the only dry bench around, so I sat there, drank my banana milk, ate my banana and my pear, then went back for more banana milk for tomorrow. I hiked back up the hill, looking in vain for my camera case again, and warmed up with coffee in the castle.

      Then I went back up to my room and wrote some postcards, ate some Printen, and updated my travel diary. After while the sun began to play peek-a-boo, so I went out for some fresh air and took a few more pictures. Later on I had another terrific meal, this evening indoors, however: Rumpsteak, Speckbohnen, Bratkartoffeln, and then Apfelstrudel mit Eis for dessert. The steak was perfect and I would never have believed green beans could be so delicious; the bacon transfigured them!

Wednesday and Thursday, Sept. 24-25: into Austria

      This was definitely the most complicated castle-to-castle trip of them all, though I didn't appreciate its true complexity until it was over. I began by getting up even earlier than I had set the alarm, which was too early, but I'd had 8 hours' sleep by then anyway. I had two very different possible routes to Admont in my book, depending upon train connections actually working out or not, the primary question being whether I managed to catch the first ICE in Nürnberg. I started eating my breakfast a little early and was outside waiting when my taxi arrived, also a little early. I was going all the way to Ansbach, and she said if the traffic let us, I might even be able to catch the earlier train to Nürnberg I had the time written down for, which would have made the connection easier. The traffic in Ansbach was too heavy, however, and I was too late for that one. I found a RegionalBahn headed my way that was due to leave soon(well before the next IC ), got on, and had second thoughts, but couldn't get the door open. A couple kids tried to help me and the conductor showed up just then. He assured me we'd get to Nürnberg in plenty of time(well before that IC), so I stayed on it.

      When I arrived just after five, Herr Horak said he was about to lock up--I'd barely made it!! Supper was at 6:00, I was told, so I went up to my room to unpack. Very nice room, with a lovely view. Supper was another matter. By 6:00 the salad was gone; the kids had finished it off. The soup was all right, but the pasta with potatoes was pretty tasteless. The cook brought out more salad, which helped. The "juice", which was all there was to drink, tasted like mysteriously-flavored sugar water. Normal hostel food was a real let-down after the great food I'd had at the hotel!
     Thursday it was a normal German breakfast, Brštchen, meat, cheese, cereal, and as much coffee as I wanted. I asked the cook about supper. It sounded a lot like last night's, so I asked if I could just have a cold supper like breakfast, and she said it was no problem. Loud mental cheers! Then as I was about to mail three postcards I had written, I realized I had put German stamps on them. They'd have to wait until I got back to Germany. The kiosk was open, so I bought Austrian stamps and some more cards, as well as the only map of the area he had. It told me that the big Benedictine abbey down in Admont has the largest abbey library in the world and that it was the oldest one in Styria, founded in 1074. This palace youth hostel was the abbot's summer residence. I can see the monastery out my window, but though I could probably walk down, I'm sure I'd need the taxi to get back up again.

      It had started out gray, but it was turning into a really nice day for some hiking: sunny and chilly. I went outside and took some pictures of the building, then decided to hike uphill so I could come back down when I was tired rather than the opposite, which going down to Admont would have entailed, and set out to find the view of the valley I'd been promised.
     I hadn't gone far up the steep road, breathing deeply of the lovely chilly air which, come to think of it, was a little thinner than I was used to: 832 meters above sea level at my starting point, when I saw a less-traveled one leading slightly downhill toward what looked like an opening--my scenic view? Naturally I had to explore it. There was a lovely view of the valley, but then the road headed further down into woods, so I went back to my steep trail for a while. Before long, however, once more two roads diverged in this piney wood, and I took the one less traveled by. Well, it wasn't so steep, at least. I found a little cascade of water running toward me and under the road. Further on there was a bigger one, and now as I walked along I could hear running water down below, but couldn't see its source.

      I needn't have worried; that big yellow and white building on the hill was visible for miles before we actually got to Melk. Early afternoon or not, shopping with full pack was not an option I wanted to do much of, so I found my hotel but could find no people. Finally I followed the sound of a vacuum cleaner. The room wasn't ready, but I only wanted to leave my backpack, so this worked out fine. The restaurant there wouldn't open until five, so I had lunch at a Konditorei/Eis Cafe: my first Schnitzel of the trip, followed by Banane Eis.(OK, so I love bananas!) By the time I paid my bill, the Verkehrsamt was open so I could get a Stadtplan and some information about the Wachau. I did some shopping, including more film, then dropped my purchases off in my room.

      I walked down to the dock my ship would be leaving from in the morning, just to see how long it would take, and took a few pictures along the way, including a couple up at the monastery. Then I sat and wrote at one of the tables in front of the hotel, had a lovely supper, and tried two new (local) wines because they had Achtel as well as Viertel on the Weinkarte.
      After eating the early breakfast I had requested, I headed for the ship landing and, since it was cool and I was rested, walked faster this time and was one of the earlier people to buy my ticket from the big van and get on board. (Yes, it was a van, and I saw it again when we docked in different towns; it obviously followed along and sold tickets there, too.)

      I paid the same price to Dürnstein and back as to Krems, so I guess it was a set price. There was a man taking pictures as we went down the gangplank, the explanation for which I didn't get until the trip back in the afternoon when I was paying attention to more than taking pictures right and left. Other people mostly stayed inside, but I headed for the open area in back. I took pictures of anything even vaguely medieval or otherwise of interest, but I was shooting toward the sun on the south bank, so I didn't get many good pictures on that side in the morning.

I couldn't count on good light in the afternoon, though as it turned out, I got it, and my pictures of Schönbühel from the afternoon were much better. Spitz(left), one of the oldest villages in the Wachau valley, is famous for its "thousand-bucket" vineyard. St. Michael's fortified church(right) was mentioned in documents as early as 987.

      And now we had reached Dürnstein and way up there on the hill was the castle ruin I'd come all this way to visit. But first just to reach the town there was this interminable flight of steps going up and up and up. . . and finally reaching the street. Different people have different priorities. I planned to climb that hill before I explored the town, while I was fairly fresh, so I went looking for a "zur Burg" sign and soon found one. It was steep. I stopped often to reoxygenate my lungs and at times to even take a picture or two. There were no benches, so I couldn't sit down and rest along the way. I stood and rested often.

      It wasn't just that the steps occurred too often; because they were separated by stretches of (steep, naturally) path, the ground at the bottom step in a group was usually eroded enough to make that step particularly high. Some were also natural stone of varying thickness. What fun! At any rate, I did finally get up to the base of the main ruin, and even asked a stranger to take a picture of me there. After I finished that film, I found a piece of what looked like part of a well or cistern just the right height for sitting, changed my film, and really rested for a while. As I was sitting there, two young men, apparently American, came along who were under the impression that King Richard I "Lionheart" had something to do with the 17th century. Shuddering, I gently(for me) straightened them out rather than collapsing in laughter.

      Richard could be pretty arrogant, and he was decidedly rude to Leopold of Austria while on crusade. On his way home, he was shipwrecked and tried to make his way across Leopold's territory in disguise but was recognized, captured, and shut up in Dürnstein castle for a considerable length of time. Later the emperor (Henry VI) took over the care of this lucrative captive and put him in Trifels(a castle I had visited on my '99 castle hunt), while his mother, Queen Eleanor, tried to get the ransom collected and his brother John hoped Richard would just stay captive. This was a long time before the 17th century. The 17th century is when it was destroyed. It was built in the 12th.
      Then as I was taking a picture of an archway, some people came through it and I asked them where they had come from. They had come up a path with no steps from the town. I had done the same thing I remembered doing at Hohenstaufen on an earlier trip: found the hard way up instead of the easy one. Well, at least I could go down the easy way, and as I did I found actual benches where I could have rested on the way up. I also realized I was seeing a line of wall running down the hill to the town and took some pictures of that. (There's one on the other side of town and castle, too.) I ended up down on the bank of the river, where I took pictures of people and ducks on the beach(which is probably not normally there, as I'd been told earlier how remarkably low the river was this year).

      After I had rested again, I went looking for a slope back up into the town, found one that at first led to the monastery when what I really wanted was a restaurant, then found a place to buy more postcards, and finally a lovely open flowery garden full of tables that turned out to belong to the Sänger Blondel Restaurant. With all this history, I ended up eating in a place devoted to the entirely fictional legend claiming Richard's favorite minstrel(except that he wasn't a "minstrel", but that's another lecture) had roamed around Europe singing the first part of his favorite song under castle windows until Richard finished it. Quite apart from its lack of factual basis, anyone who looked at the sites of castles like Dürnstein or Trifels would have to admit that there was no place for someone to stand next to the castle wall without an antigravity device of some sort. Anyway, I had a Wachau speciality of tender bits of beef, mushrooms, some kind of browned potatoes I hadn't had before, and apricots. It was an unfamiliar combination for me(but typically Wachau, I learned) and quite delicious. And for dessert(I had certainly earned one!) a Wachau Nußtorte.

      After breakfast on Sunday, since it was much too early to think about visiting the Stift up on the hill, I got out my Melk map and went out to explore a little. I walked across the little bridge over the Altarm and found a poster about some opera that night at the Stift. (Later I asked about it up there and learned it was just selections from two different operas and decided not to go.) Then I found a phone booth and was going to call a fellow harper I'd met via internet, and find out how to get to her house, but the directions in the booth told me how many Austrian Schilling to put in. Would it even accept Euro coins? and if so, what size? I went back to the hotel with my problem and was allowed to use their phone. The directions were complicated, so it was a good thing I wasn't trying to write them down and feed coins to a phone while writing!

      Now it was late enough to start up to the Stift, so I did, taking a few exterior pictures along the way, and bought a ticket for a guided tour. Due to some confusion as to which guide I was supposed to follow(there were what turned out to be two groups mixed up there, the one I was supposed to follow took off so fast I lost sight of the group at once, went back to object, and ended up with the other group, which was an advantage, as they were more my age and unlikely to disappear suddenly. We had an excellent guide and the museum was interesting. (I discovered later that he gave us more information I was interested in than I was able to find in the book I bought, at least about the library. ) After the tour of the museum, we went out on to the balcony, where I took some pictures of Melk from above, then into the library. That was the part that blew me away! They had a fire a few centuries ago that destroyed an incredible number of priceless manuscripts and books and they still had many more left. This was an inspiriation for Eco's Name of the Rose.

      That was just the beginning of my lodging problem in Vienna. The reception desk was manned by the most unpleasant creature I recall ever encountering in a youth hostel in the quarter of a century I've been staying in them. He gave me a strange contraption that looked nothing like either a key or a key card, told me if I wanted a towel I'd have to buy it(I did, and considered it as rent, because I didn't want to carry a wet towel along when I left), and told me my room was in a building around the corner, then rushed off to let someone there into a room, much too fast for me to follow him.
      I eventually found the building, followed a sort of indoor alley to a door I couldn't figure out how to open and was wondering if I'd have to go back to the other building for help when two young men came out and showed me how the key-substitute opened that door. So where was my room? There were no numbers anything like mine on room doors as I walked along the corridor. A man came along and I asked him; he said it was on the next floor. After I started up the stairs I found room number directions on the wall. When I found the room, the key-substitute wouldn't open this door either, at least not the way it opened the outer door, but as I was trying to get it open, one of my roommates-to-be, a Belgian girl, opened it from inside and showed me how the thing worked on this door. I later discovered from the other two occupants of the room that none had been told how to use these key-substitutes. I wonder how many other people the non-info-giver at the desk had to come over and open doors for? Three of the beds in the room were already taken, and there's no way on earth my 69-year-old legs were going to get me into and out of an upper bunk, so I put my mattress on the floor with her help and slept there.

     Since the beds were just mattresses on solid boards anyway, the floor was just as comfortable as well as considerably more accessible, and I had a good night's sleep, so I was ready to face the youth hostel people once more. It was time to see what breakfast was like here. Since I was going to be leaving before the breakfast I'd already paid for the next day, I didn't feel the least bit guilty about eating a big one, not that it was even a particularly good youth hostel breakfast, but the Brötchen were good, at least. And there was a human being at the desk this time.
      Our Japanese roommate was still asleep when I went back to the room, so I took my trip diary down the hall to a room with some tables to write, where a woman I discovered was our other roommate told me there is a direct bus to Südbahnhof from near the hostel. I walked to the subway station, which was a lot closer in daylight without zigzags, checking the bus stop for times on the way, and went to the middle of the city. The first thing I noticed was the cathedral, but the second was a brightly-painted horse. There were many more of them here and there. There were also some performance artists doing living statue bits. And after walking around a little, I sat down in an open-air cafe area for an Apfelschorle because I was thirsty and hadn't decided just what I wanted to do next. I had bought some postcards, one of them a mini-map of the middle of the city which I compared to my big map and decided I wanted to find Vienna's oldest church--something from the centuries that interested me more than most of what Vienna had to offer.

     After visiting the cathedral and buying a booklet and some cards of its stained glass, I had a Schnitzel sandwich from a street stand, then tried to head for the older Ruprechtskirche using my compass and mini-map. Along the way I paused for some really good Eis(Banane and Haselnuß). I kept following what seemed to be the right street and came to a park along the Donau Kanal(with, of course, another painted horse), actually turned the right direction and found the church. There was also an art gallery with very modern art right next to Vienna's oldest church, which was rather overgrown with vines.
     I circled back around toward the Danube, found nothing particularly interesting, and began to think about coffee as I headed back toward the center. I found another outdoor cafe, began to look at its menu, discovered they had small servings of wine and one was the Grüner Veltliner I'd come to like in the Wachau, and had wine instead.