There are many easy hiking trails in Germany
Do You Know Your German Wine Festivals? Having told you so much about wine festivals in the Palatinate for the past two weeks, we simply have to take you to one. Although I must quickly add that the Kaisertafel in Speyer, the region’s historic capital, is not, strictly speaking, a “wine festival” and more of…
Hiking in Germany Two Castles with a Medieval Tale to Tell Wolfstein, the starting point or final stop of the Pfälzer Höhenweg hiking trail in the northern Palatinate, is a handsome small town with quite a few period buildings ….. … but most of the visitor’s interest will inevitably focus on its two castles nearby,…
Where to go hiking in Germany Easy Hiker never pretends to have all the answers. For example, one question that I still have not been able to settle after all these years on the road is this: What’s the better hiking holiday – a continuous trail that you follow from town to town or a…
Hiking in Germany For our second hiking trip in the Palatinate, we tackled the stretch between Waldfischbach and Heltersberg, which is largely identical with stage 4 of the 9-stage “Pfälzer Waldpfad” (the Palatine Forest Trail). The Soul Rocks in the Palatinate Out of our three planned hikes, this was the one about which I had…
Hiking in Germany Hiking and Riesling in the Palatinate There are certainly regions in Germany with a higher profile than the Palatinate – even the natives of this part of southwestern Germany would probably accept that without objections. The Palatinate’s problem is that it is a little “stashed away” at some distance from the busy transport…
Day Hiking in Germany A Coal Mine Called Nightingale Nightingale or Nachtigall Colliery (“Zeche Nachtigall“) at the foot of the Muttental trail prides itself on being the “cradle of coal mining” in West Germany. Coal was actually dug out of the surrounding hillsides as long as 300 years ago, and in 1839, at the very…
Got Two Hours in Cologne? Cologne is one of Germany’s main hiking hubs: whether you are going to the Rheinsteig, the Rothaarsteig, the Eifelsteig or any other trail in the Northwest of Germany, you are likely to pass through. But rather than just hopping off the airport bus into Cologne central station or using the…
Easy hiking in Germany Meet the Lake District of the Ruhr A few weeks ago, we travelled all the way to the Mecklenburger Seenplatte in Germany’s “Far East” to experience a near-Scandinavian blend of beauty and bleakness. This week, we discovered that we could have had all of that much closer to “home”. Well, nearly…
Hiking in Germany The Coalminers Trail There are two things you should know about the Muttental Mining Trail, east of the Ruhrgebiet, Germany’s old industrial heartland: Firstly, for nearly all of the trail’s 9 km, you would never think that you are in the middle of what is essentially a city of 7 or 8…
Bricks in Buildings Architects in most European countries have always considered bricks second rate material, i.e. inferior to stone. As a consequence, there are fairly few “prestige buildings” across Europe – churches, palaces of the high aristocracy – that are made of bricks. The exception to this rule is the extreme North of Germany (and…
