Slugs and Slate

We couldn’t fig­ure out the inter­net con­nec­tion last night (only got our Tweets out by phone) and though the camp­ground pro­pri­etor promised to check in on us at the bun­ga­low he never did—perhaps he was put off by the del­uge drown­ing the coun­try­side. So this post comes a bit behind schedule.

We left Arn­stadt later than planned, not least of all because the Har­land fam­ily was so lovely and their home so pleas­ant. There was also the small mat­ter of not being sure what route to take. We’d orig­i­nally planned to fol­low the San­ti­ago de Com­postela south through Dees­bach and Paulinzella to Coburg, but a call less than two weeks ago with a local pas­tor alerted us to the fact that Luther most cer­tainly didn’t go that way but a lit­tle far­ther west, through Ilme­nau and Eis­feld to Coburg. Though we can’t retrace Luther’s steps with absolutely cer­tainty or desir­abil­ity every­where (the lat­ter cat­e­gory when the old routes have turned into major high­ways), we fig­ured a good start with a reli­able source was the way to go. Any­way, the Har­lands helped us cob­ble together a few other routes, chiefly the “Gera” bike route, to get us to our camp­ground between Moos­bach and Stützerbach.

On the way out of Arn­stadt (which we’d had lit­tle chance to appre­ci­ate last night in the rain—have we men­tioned that it’s been rain­ing?) we took a peek at the church where Bach held his first post before head­ing out of town.

The two most mem­o­rable sights along the way today were the slugs and slate.

Euro­pean slugs—for the infor­ma­tion of our Amer­i­can readers—are not banana slugs, though they are almost as gross. They tend to be fat and long, some­times three inches long, a rich mahogany brown, with two black anten­nae point­ing up in a very pert and alert way. They also love side­walks, espe­cially in wet weather. It’s impos­si­ble not to notice them. We’ve seen a few honk­ing huge snails too.

The other thing is the slate. Thuringia is a big slate-producing region; it’s a nice dark gray almost black color. Pre­vi­ously we had only ever seen slate on roofs, but here they have such a glut of it that they even put it all over the sides of houses too—sometimes ver­ti­cal wooden sid­ing on one wall and slate shin­gles on another. The slate is often in pat­terns, some quite fan­ci­ful, and even in oth­er­wise depressed-looking, post-DDR towns. Church steeples are fre­quently cov­ered with it.

We only had a chance to talk to one per­son about the pil­grim­age today, an old man wait­ing for the bus who could tell by our rather silly attire that we were hik­ers. When he asked where we were going, and I said Rome, he replied, “Zum Papst?” Well, almost.

The last cou­ple hours of the trip were over a hill and through forests, and in just about the most irri­tat­ing weather imag­in­able, chang­ing every five min­utes from sun­shine to rain, from too cold to too hot. We finally made our des­ti­na­tion 9 hours and 30 km later and as the rain went from irri­tat­ing to down­right threat­en­ing we enjoyed the roof over our heads and a hot din­ner. And the com­pany of one very cute, very uncatch­able mouse.

Terry Stettler says:
August 25, 2010 at 2:59 am
I love your blog. I will be read­ing your progress every day. Did you know that today, August 24th, is another anniver­sary? The 1,600th anniver­sary of the first sack of Impe­r­ial Rome by an army of Visig­oths. It is also con­sid­ered a key date in Euro­pean history.
Terry Stet­tler
Eas­ton, Penn­syl­va­nia, USA
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