Home is everything you can walk to.
– Rebecca Solnit
It was wonderful to stay in a home and be part of a family for a night. I washed all my things in the washing machine, took a bath, had dinner in company. The next day was May first, Labour Day all over Europe, but Astrid was up early baking buns for breakfast from the dough Alexander had mixed in the evening and left to rise overnight. We had a leisurely breakfast and Jens offered me advice and information about hiking in the Harz mountains, which I will be coming to in a few days. Then I set off, leaving the city of Braunschweig through the Burgerpark, which is not a place to get fast food, but a beautiful city park, where people were out jogging, walking and cycling on this sunny May Day morning. I passed a vintage car rally and continued along a cycling route marked Wolfenbüttel: 10 km. Finally, an easy day!
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| Urban beach in the park |
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| Vintage car rally |
I passed a large group of people who seemed to be walking very quietly. Then I realised it was a group of deaf people, chattering away in sign language!
The cycling track continued through a sort of green belt between the river and a lake. I sat on a bench under a weeping willow by the Oker River and ate my picnic lunch: a carrot, an apple and a homemade bread bun Astrid had given me, a piece of Gouda cheese that had been slowly maturing in my backpack over the past few days, dried apricots, chocolate.
I got up from my bench and continued along the side of the river, when I should actually have crossed the footbridge and proceeded along the other side! When I realised my mistake, rather than go back I turned to Mapy.cz to find me an alternate route to the next bridge over the Oker. This took me past the village of Leiferde to Stockheim, where I rejoined the Via Romea Germanica on a cycling path across the fields. I passed under the Autobahn and then turned off the official route onto another cycling path to take the shortest way to my accommodations; my host for this evening had kindly sent me a map showing the quickest way to get there.
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| Beside the Autobahn |
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| This is what the underside of the Autobahn looks like |
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| Cycling path into Wolfenbüttel |
The problem with cycling paths is that they are asphalted, which is hard on the feet and hot in the sun! Also there are no benches along the way, as cyclists get where they are going so fast, they don't really need benches! But I did, so I stopped in a playground just outside the town to drink some water and let some of the sweat dry off before I arrived at my new hosts' home. 😁
This time, my Servas hosts were located at the very beginning of the town. This was really perfect: I could stop by, put down my backpack, rest a bit and get changed before going to see the town centre. It was a pleasant walk into town along the river bank; my host Jörg came along and showed me around.
Wolfenbüttel
With a population of 52,000, Wolfenbüttel has the biggest concentration of timber-framed houses in Germany, about a thousand of them!
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| The smallest house in Wolfenbüttel |
In the literary world,Wolfenbüttel is known as the hometown of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, a German dramatist, publicist and art critic of the Enlightenment era; among the less enlightened, the city is renowned as the birthplace of Jägermeister liqueur. But most importantly in relation to the Via Romea Germanica, it is the home of Bibliotheca Augusta, originally the Herzogliche Bibliothek, founded in 1572, which contains a copy of Abbott Albert's Annales Stadenses, the volume on the basis of which the pilgrimage route from Stade to Rome was reconstructed.
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| In my chic civilian attire outside the Bibliotheca Augusta |
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| Wolfenbüttel castle, surrounded by a moat |
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| In the castle courtyard |
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| The armoury |
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| Jörg and Sylke |
Sounds like a wonderful day, and that pristine blue sky is entrancing!
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