April 4, 2018
Day 9: Duren to Remagen (Kripps)
Here is the picture of our route today. It is quite unremarkable to look at, and in fact it felt unremarkable, at least at the outset.
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This idea that the route was unremarkable popped into my head after we had been cycling for a couple of hours. I thought, "Hey I haven't taken any photos, why not? " And then, "Well whatever is out there should be newsworthy in some way, so just shoot exactly what you see right now". Here is the first shot I then took:
And soon after I shot this:
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These images, neither boring nor great continued until Rheinbach. Rheinbach could perhaps be called the first of the very attractive towns of the Rhine region that we are going to run in to. It was in Rheinbach, for instance, that we saw the first of the fachwerk (half timbered) buildings.
Rheinbach also marked the beginning of an unexpected region of large apple orchards. These were remarkable for the density of the trees and the extreme way they were pruned. Generally they were trained to be very vertical, almost like grape vines. We had seen this technique once before, in Italy, but thought it was unique to there.
Seeing so many well pruned apple trees made us want to go home and prune ours. But of course we know ours would never put up with a regime such as we see here. To do it, you need to start when the trees are young and keep it up without fail year by year.
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There is no really official route from Maastricht to Remagen, so I think we relied on something like bikemap.net to plot a route for us. Generally it was good, but the program seemed to think we would enjoy a closer look at the apple orchards by travelling on the tractor roads. Actually it was right, though the rough tracks did slow us down. The situation looked like this:
We had looked at the wiggly shape of the road as it neared Remagen and assumed it meant some climbing. We were half right. The wiggly road was descending, to the Rhine. The total length of the descent was no more than about 8 km, but the slope was such that we really would not have wanted to be going the other way. It reminded us of that road out of St. Jean Pied de Port into the Pyrenees. As it was, we just enjoyed having the good hydraulic brakes.
The descent passed by the Apollinarus Church. This is a neo-Gothic design constructed in 1839-43 by the same architect who designed the Cologne Cathedral. It’s considered one of the premiere 19th-century churches in the Rhineland region and is particularly known for frescoes. Located on a hill overlooking the Rhine, it is quite a landmark.
According to spiritualtravels.info: "Located on a high promontory overlooking the Rhine River, St. Apollinaris Church has been a pilgrimage destination for many centuries. In the Roman era there was a temple to Jupiter located here, followed by a Christian church from at least the ninth century.
According to legend, in 1164 the Archbishop of Cologne was sailing on the Rhine with relics from the Three Magi and St. Apollinaris (a second-century Roman bishop who was one of the earliest Christian martyrs). The boat’s rudder stopped working as it passed Remagen and would only become functional again when the relics of St. Apollinaris were carried up to Martin’s Mount, as the promontory was then called.
In 1383 Duke Wilhelm I stole the relics and brought them to Dusseldorf, but he missed getting the skull because it had been hidden in Landskron Castle. In 1793 the skull was taken to Siegburg to protect it from the French, and in 1812 it was reunited with the remaining relics in Dusseldorf. After considerable negotiation, in 1857 the skull was brought back to St. Apollinaris Church, where it remains to this day."
The church is also associated with St. Martin, who died in Candes, France and is buried in Tours - both sites we have visited. It's not that the saint was here, apparently, but there is a St Martin's chapel nonetheless. What's more, there is a Fall tradition of children going door to door for sweets, plus bonfires. It's the Feast of St Martin. The whole tradition sounds exactly like Halloween in North America, but it seems to be St Martin based here.
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After the church (which foolishly we didn't visit) we very quickly proceeded to the banks of the Rhine. It is always a thrill to make it to this important boundary, though we have now done it quite a few times.
Our next stop was the very famous bridge at Remagen, which was known as the Ludendorff Bridge until it was destroyed in WWII. The bridge was built from 1916 to 1918 to help supply German troops at the Western front, but it was equally strategic when captured by the Americans in March 1945. The German side had tried to destroy it and had failed, causing Hitler to have four officers shot for dereliction. There were later attempts to bring the bridge down, involving divers and even it seems firing V1 rockets at it. In fact about 10 days after its capture the bridge did collapse, killing 30 American soldiers.
The story of the bridge was a media event and accounts of what happened were written from both the German and American sides. Finally the story became a movie, the 1968 "The Bridge at Remagen".
Today only the support structures remain on either side of the river. Inside the one on the left bank there is a museum whose theme is world peace. The museum also contains many rooms of memorabilia about the bridge, from before and after photos to news coverage to the sad account of how the population of Remagen suffered during aerial bombings of the bridge area.
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6 years ago
6 years ago
We remembered we had liked the modest Hotel Rhein Inn, a little beyond Remagen, at Kripp. At 63 euros including breakfast it is a good deal, though the rooms at the cheap rate are small.
The owner remembered us, and we talked about when it was that we had been here. This prompted the owner to tell us about how in January and February the Rhine had flooded, filling the hotel with up to four feet of river water. It really amazed us how well the place had been cleaned up, given that magnitude of disaster. But we learned about how they had stacked and moved everything movable, and how they had used silicon and plywood to make barriers to seal off corridors. Finally, he said, the pressure washer was an effective cleaning tool. This all seemed to be accepted as a routine cost of doing business, and the owner reeled off the years in which there had been previous floods and the severity of each one. The floods are triggered by snow pack in the Alps, by rains, and by flooding of the Mosel, which of course draws it waters from France.
Today's ride: 79 km (49 miles)
Total: 389 km (242 miles)
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6 years ago
6 years ago