Via Romea Germanica Day 22: Münchenlohra - Ebeleben

 Every step is worth celebrating 

- shoe commercial that just came up on my phone 😄

Today is Ascension Day! A holiday in Germany, where it is known by the rather inelegant name of Himmelfahrt. 😆 Literally meaning "ride to heaven" - an easier way of getting there than by the Stairway to Heaven! The holiday has, over the centuries, become largely secularised, and morphed into Father's Day (on the basis of the reasoning that, with His Ascension, Jesus returned to his Father). And the German version of Father's Day, also known simply as Men's Day, Männertag, involves doing manly things, such as drinking a lot of beer! For more details, here is an explanation of this uniquely German holiday.

I began my Ascension Day with an ascent, getting a little closer to heaven the hard way: climbing a steep slope in the forest and gaining about 200 metres in elevation. 

I started by walking a couple of kilometres back from Münchenlohra to Hainrode, where I sat on a bench and asked mapy.cz to figure out the best way from there to Ebeleben. I wanted to see if it would come up with something more intelligent than walking all the way back to the Via Romea Germanica route by the same way as I had come in the evening. And it did! I specified that I wanted a marked, established trail, not just the shortest route from A to B on foot, and the app sent me along the Hainröder Wandersweg up to Hainröder Stein, at a whopping altitude of 423 metres above sea level. Woo-hoo!! 😄

Leaving Kloster Münchenlohra in the morning sunshine 

I saw a deer here!

I crossed some pastureland at the top and then went back into the forest on a gravel road, where I came across a group of people, mostly men, who appeared to have got there on a trailer towed by a rather ancient tractor, standing around in the woods drinking something out of a bottle. I don't think it was water.

The gravel road came out onto a paved road, where I encountered another vintage tractor, flying the Union Jack, possibly on its way to rescue the group stranded in the forest, whose own ancient tractor may perhaps have broken down (it occurred to me). Then a tourist train, of the type normally used for cheesy city sightseeing tours, puffed up the hill full of people waving and cheering. At the bottom of this road, in the village of Straußberg, a group of teenaged girls set out, heading up the hill towing little carts laden with picnic supplies and a loudspeaker blaring dance music; a small group of middle-aged hikers followed, knapsacks on their backs, cans of beer in their hands. 

So the thing to do on Ascension Day appears to be ascend a hill, by whatever means you have at your disposal, and have a picnic at the top, drinking as much beer as you can along the way! I did the same, minus the beer, climbing to the top of the next ridge after Straußberg, spreading out my rain poncho as a picnic blanket on the grass, and having my own solitary Ascension Day picnic of cheese sandwiches and chocolate.

This was about halfway down a dead straight gravel road that I must have followed for at least ten kilometres! Along the way I discovered that walking on a gravel road with your trousers tucked into your socks is a quick way to accumulate a sizeable rock collection, so the picnic stop also served to empty my boots of pebbles, and give my feet a rest.

The straight road became paved coming into the sleepy village of Schernberg, and curved ever so slightly to make its way around the village green, where I sat on a bench for a rest. The bench was actually put there for ride-sharing - the instructions said to mark your direction of travel with the red sliding cursor on the signpost, wait for someone to stop and offer you a lift, and if you like the look of them, get in! (That's literally what it says - at least according to Google Translate!)

Somebody's proud of his truck!

Did Barbie retire here?

Another vintage tractor goes by

The other thing Germans do on Ascension Day is go for bike rides, a much healthier tradition. When my straight gravel road became a paved cycling track, it was quite busy. The straight stretch finally ended with a sharp turn to the right, then a railway crossing; another turn to the left brought me into the town of Ebeleben, passing by the enormous grain silos next to the railway tracks. I continued into the town and found the Diakonie, the church-run centre where I had requested accommodation; I wasn't expecting a luxurious miniature flat, with the castle gardens as my back yard! 

The problem was how to get in: it being a holiday, the people who usually worked at the centre were not around. I had instructions to pick up the key in a certain building, which turned out to be a home for people with mental disabilities. An awkward moment ensued as I attempted to figure out which people were the patients and which were staff 😄. Without speaking more than a few words of German! Finally a man asked if I needed help and I told him I was the pilgrim. He made a phone call and then got me sorted with the keys, the location of my room, and possible places to get some food on this holiday afternoon. He even spoke some English, which was a great help! 

The miniature flat has its own well-equipped kitchen, but the grocery store was closed for the holiday, so dinner was falafel and halloumi with fries, salad and Ayran, from the Turkish kebab shop! In the castle gardens,  of course!

Münchenlohra - Ebeleben 26 km