Tschüss Germany, Grüss Gott Austria

After break­fast yes­ter­day morn­ing at the Pil­gerzen­trum with our hosts, and a quick retrac­ing of our steps into town to pick up food for the day, we began the steady upward climb to Pfän­der, the high point over­look­ing Bre­genz and Lake Con­stance (the Bodensee, as ger­manophones call it). It was another drea­rily rain­ing morn­ing for the first few hours, but most of it was in lovely old for­est, a nice change from straight bike paths and corn­fields that have made up most of our jour­ney so far.

Around 11 o’clock we finally exited the first of the 5 coun­tries we’re pass­ing though in this pil­grim­age, rather anti­cli­mat­i­cally for all the time we’ve spent in Ger­many. We just came around a bend in the for­est track, saw a frame for where a sign used to be, and on the other side of the road a still-existing sign declar­ing our entry in Vorarl­berg. That’s the name of the region of Aus­tria we’re in; funny that they didn’t bother to say the nation, just the region. The back­side of this sign men­tioned that we were cross­ing a “National Bound­ary,” but once again didn’t bother to say what they were. No fence, no cus­toms booth, no noth­ing at all. God bless the EU. Though it’s hard to believe it was ever a very fiercely guarded bor­der crossing.

Any­way, that was it! 27 days in Ger­many. It has given us new appre­ci­a­tion of just how enor­mous what even in the 16th cen­tury could be thought of as “Ger­many” would have been to a medieval per­son, when rid­ing a horse-drawn cart was really no faster than going on foot.

It was another hour or two to Pfän­der from there. We stopped for a bite of lunch while enjoy­ing the view of the lake with the Ger­man town of Lin­dau on the north shore and Bre­genz on the south shore (though Andrew seemed far more drawn to the enor­mous radio tower than the view). After that we had a choice between the longer, gen­tler route down to Bre­genz, or the shorter “Berg­wan­der­weg” with apoc­a­lyp­tic signs warn­ing you about your footwear and that it was not suit­able for baby car­riages. We man­aged just fine in our Crocs and sneaker-sandals (despite the ner­vous protes­ta­tions of a num­ber of peo­ple we met along the way), though we’d have to agree with the baby car­riage warn­ing. It was actu­ally quite an excit­ing down­ward trip, 500 m alto­gether, much of it slip­pery or cov­ered with the stick­i­est mud I’ve ever encountered.

Our way into Bre­genz was through a curi­ous con­trast of ultra-modern homes and charm­ingly old-fashioned ones, a city gate adorned with a deer’s skull and antlers hung with a cross, and cute lit­tle streets lined with old-fashioned street lamps. We walked along the lake to the nicest youth hos­tel we’ve ever seen for fourth happy fam­ily reunion and another rest day.

(We’re also pleased to report a brief arti­cle sum­ma­riz­ing our trip so far on the web­site of Books & Cul­ture–take a look!)

paul sailhamer says:
September 20, 2010 at 5:01 pm
Your com­ments on bound­aries are inter­est­ing. Makes me think of the free­dom to go from state to state in the USA…God Bless the USA! Also made me think of how daunt­ing those bor­ders were for a Jew try­ing to escape from 1935 or so until 1945. Or those try­ing to flee west from the Soviet block from @ 1948 to 1989. I’m from the gen­er­a­tion that remem­bers those days.
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