August 23, 2012
Day 96: Mannheim to Ibersheim, Germany: A Diet of Worms (and more Worms)
North of Heidelberg we had met Ursel, a cyclist from Stuttgart headed for the Black Forest. As usually happens, we ran in to her again at the camping, and this morning she was up at about the same time we were.
Ursel watched me plugging the cell phone into the Energiser backup and volunteered that she had a dynamo system for this. Wow, one of my favourite topics! I thought I had heard of all the available options, but Ursel had a unit that was new to me. It’s a big battery that has cabling to end in a USB female. I am not sure if there is an integral voltage regulator/inverter or anything else about it, except that Ursel says it works and that it functions at low speeds. I will be sure to check out the (German) manufactrer’s web site when we get home. (See photo).
Since Mannheim is a big city, we were apprehensive about finding the way though it. However, the bike path guided us through quite efficiently, and a first even offered a quite pleasant leafy corridor through the suburbs. The street it lead us through in downtown just whizzed by, but I did notice that it was a strange mixture of wedding and other dress stores, and Turkish import shops and restaurants. Strange, unless perhaps the dress retail industry is a Turkish specialty.
In what appeared to be the central square, we found a food market, just setting up. We love these (and found one later in Worms) but it was still too early. When we crossed the bridge to Ludwigshafen (Mannheim and Ludwigshafen are both large cities, across the Rhine from each other)) we saw the Rhine again, for the first time since we left it at Basel. We did not stop for any high fives, but it meant we had cycled the Nekar!
Ludwigshafen is the home of chemical giant BASF, and giant must be the right term. The BASF “plant” is a city, that we cycled by for about 12 km. There are many gates into the compound, and many parts of the company resident. It was hard to see all the buildings and processing structures, but there clearly was a mixture of pleasant older brick buildings, faceless boxes, and processing with tangled pipes and giant storage tanks.
We mused about all the specialists and workers that are needed to run a thing like that. Just the computer support for the “city” must be a very complicated thing. Oe management area that popped out for us was transportation and parking. We found hundreds (or thousands) of bicycles parked in massive clusters. Clearly, the company provides these to workers. Of course we don’t know what the terms are, but it seemed the area of bike parking exceeded that of car parking. Had the cyclists all been in cars, then the parking lots would have had to be many times larger.
When BASF finally ended, we got a few km of country riding in. There was shaded pathway by the river, and familiar riding through farm fields. Things are starting to change, though. As we started this ride, in May, we watched young crops getting established. During the summer the corn, for instance, grew tall. Then the cobs appeared, first being held upright, them leaning outward, as if inviting you to pick them. Now, they are hanging downward, because they are feed corn and need to dry. This progression tells us, better than a calendar, that our ride will soon (well, sort of soon)) draw to a close. Anyway, today it was the onions’ turn to be ready, and harvested. We came across a field where the onions had been windrowed, in order to dry. A goodly number ended up on the bike path, and three of these ended up in our handlebar bags. Ummm, farm fresh!
Very soon we came to Worms. We knew of Worms as a medieval city, and the place where Martin Luther had kick started the Reformation, at the “Diet of Worms”, in 1521. This “diet” was one of the (few) things that stuck in our heads from high school, just because it sounded funny to us.
However the first interesting thing we found in Worms was a “WC”, a toilet facility run by the city, in the Rathaus. Score 1 for Worms.
Also at the Rathaus was a small but good market. There were three cheese vendors, each with a large variety. There was also a baker, with the oven in a trailer, and very strong and dark breads on offer.
The rathaus was built after the war, and so lacks the drop dead gorgeous appearance of the medieval ones. However the style was somewhat in keeping. Not so most of the other buildings standing around. They were standard unimaginative post war stuff.
But then, rising above the post war melange was the looming and dramatically ancient looking cathedral. The earliest part of the cathedral dates from 1000, but the major structure was consecrated in 1181. It was also “updated” in 1300.
It was hard to get a clear look at or photo of the cathedral, because there were so many “junk” buildings standing so close to it. Going inside was also a matter of finding the right way, because of ongoing restoration work,
Before making any attempt with the cathedral, we went in to the tourist information, and came out with five excellent pamphlets. Three covered religions, and dealt with The Cathedral and the Romanesque Period, Jewish history, and Luther and the Reformation. One dealt with wine, and included the story of Liebfrauenmilch, the famous wine grown within the city at the Church of Our Lady. The last pamphlet called Worms the City of the Nibelungen, which refers to some sort of epic myth. I think someone called Siegfried slew a dragon in this one, but right now am not at all sure. Anyway, there is a Siegfried statue and lots of dragons around town.
We thought it would be a good idea to learn everything about these five topics. But even the Grampies know you can not do this in five minutes. We had learned that there is a bike lockup at the central downtown parking building, and we stashed all our stuff there so we could walk around freely.
So off we went on our project to learn everything about Worms. Unfortunately, whereas the day had been fairly cool, the sun now came out. Before too long we were wilted and ready to quit. However, we had at least visited city museum’s roman gravestones, the Jewish cemetery (oldest in Europe, with the oldest stone being from 1076), the cathedral, and the Martin Luther memorial.
It took two bottles of Fanta Orange to givc us the strength to then even retrieve our bikes and head back to the bike route. At least to head back in a theoretical way. Worms is one of the first places we have hit where the automobile roads really get in the way of moving about by bike. We knew basically where the route was, but could not get to the exact spots needed to pick it up.
So we spent about two hours circling the town. One of the advantages was that we circled by the old synagogue, and the Church of Our Lady. Had we been more with it, we would have missed these!
When finally we did get going along the Rhine, our Worms adventure had eaten all of the day. There was camping within about 20 more km, but when Dodie spied two linked covered shelters in a playground, we went for it!
The shelters do not have tables, but there are benches, and oodles of room. Dodie has now turned in, in the “bedroom”, while I am writing this in the combined den and dining room. Tomorrow we will continue towards Mainz. We may be cured of trying to learn everything about every place, at least if it is going to be sunny!
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Today's ride: 59 km (37 miles)
Total: 4,774 km (2,965 miles)
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