This was mostly a travel day. We left our spacious vacation rental behind (very tidy, if I say so myself) bright and early for an 8:21 AM train from Leinefelde for the half hour ride to Göttingen, but were delayed because of a cow herd on the tracks. Even though we missed our original connection from Göttingen to Hanover, we caught a train within a half hour or so (which gave me time to discover a large-size poster reminding people of resources about the history of Jewish life in Göttingen at the train station). We ended up with one more transfer city than we had counted on, but with the three of us doing it together, all with small suitcases, it wasn’t too bad. We all dozed off between Hannover and Löhne, the longest leg of the trip, and then were in Osnabrück just before 2 pm. The last part was the bus home.
A side note on transportation costs: This was 29 Euro for Imke for a day ticket that covers Lower Saxony but included the first few miles outside of the state. For Mark and me, this and all other trips in June are part of our 62 Euro “Germany Ticket” for the month, which allows us to use all regional trains (so no ICE fast trains) and all local public transport in every German city. It has already paid for itself multiple times over. Given that we dislike driving here because then we can’t gawk at things, and that gas is over 2 euro a liter, so the equivalent of $9 a gallon, we are happy with the German rail system and take the delays in stride. But this is not how the Germans look at it typically, because the infrastructure is aging, complicated by privatization and very much overloaded, and long delays have replaced the Deutsche Bahn’s famed punctuality that made people fuss over trains that were 3 minutes late, and allowed transfer times of less than 5 minutes. So there are lots of complaints, which usually cease when I explain that there are only *two* trains a day that come through Lincoln (Amtrak’s California Zephyr stops here on its way to Chicago and to Denver, respectively), that they are supposed to arrive between 2 and 4 in the morning, and are often hours late in both directions.
We were pretty tired when we got home, but after a short rest, Mark and I heroically did the small grocery run that was needed for the next few days, toodling off to the supermarket that is 3 blocks from here with Imke’s little two-wheeler, and picking up a little cake for afternoon coffee and some rolls for dinner at the bakery next to it. The cake was lovely, and before we had dinner, Mark and I decided to go on a bit of a walk after all the sitting around on trains all day. We took a bus out to a nearby lake where we’ve been many times, walked about 2/3 around it and then cut back through the Heger Holz, a lovely forest that connects directly to the path home to Imke’s across the Westerberg. It was a wonderful long walk (4.5 miles / ) with lots of bird song, including a nightingale we heard very close by (but couldn’t see; if I figure out how, I’ll put an audio file here later!).
When we got back around 8 pm, we had a lovely evening meal with the rolls I had bought and many different cheeses (but much less meat than at Irmgard’s evening table!) and went to bed quite early to recover from our long travel day.