Last week, we enjoyed the baroque splendour of the landscaped gardens around the Prinz Moritz trail. Today, we stay in the same area and (roughly) the same period of German history, moving only a few kilometres up the Lower Rhine Valley and a few decades down the line to the time of the friendship between…
Germany is Europe’s premier hiking country: nowhere else on the “old continent” will you be able to find a similarly large number and variety of well-designed and diligently maintained trails. Few hikers outside of Germany, however, will be able to name a trail that does not run either through the Black Forest or along the…
As the saying goes, the past is never dead. It is not even past. Passing through almost any town or village in Europe, you can – with a little skill and effort – still spot the stains of dried blood that have been left behind by the crimes and misdemeanours of past centuries. Perhaps you…
The city of Potsdam is the number one daytrip destination from Berlin. And for good reasons, too: it is surrounded by parks and forests, contains several picturesque bodies of water and provides paths for hiking and biking. Above all, however, it is full of history: old history – as the former residence of Prussia’s most…
There is, as the Book of Ecclesiastes says, a time and a season for everything: a season for exhausting hikes through mountainous territory (spring, let’s say), a season for coastal walks with swimming wear in the backpack (that would be summer, of course), and a season for themed town walks in two halves with a…
There are not many things that East Germany (that most joyless country in the annals of the world) and Italy have in common, but here is one: a conservation policy that closely mirrors the principles of “triage”. In analogy to the requirements of battlefield medicine, both Italy and East Germany divided their cities or cultural…
In the initial post about our trip along the Danube, I said that the Rhine landscape featured a large number of castles. While this is undeniably true, it may have been misconstrued to imply that the landscape of the Danube did not. So let me clearly state once and for all that this would be…
Considering we have sung the praises of Regensburg in our last post, it seems all the more unforgivable that we failed to mention the city’s key asset on the central European tourism market: the fact that its entire (and fairly substantial) Old Town has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. You are forgiven to ask,…
Alone among European countries, Germany can claim sections of both the Rhine and the Danube, Europe’s most storied rivers. Most of you will have been aware of that, of course, but here is something that may surprise you: the German sections of both rivers are of a roughly similar length (865 km for the Rhine,…
Münster is one of western Germany’s most favourite day trip destinations and also happens to be a modern art hotspot. People from the region and beyond like to come here partly to experience the town’s ancient and interesting history: in 1535, the Siege of Münster ended the tyrannical regime of the eccentric Jan van Leiden, a…
