h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I finished reading your travelogue last night. It was very easy reading and you obviously put a lot of preparation into the holiday.

Thank you very much for honouring me by presenting me with it in book form!

You know you can cycle along the Rhine, don't you. You'd pass my door!

Thank you!

Our next plan is the north of Spain, in September of this year. We decided to stick to wine-producing countries.

Of course there is Rhine wine, Rheinwein, (Rhenish varnish?) . . . No doubt the stuff they sell at home is better than what they export here. Red wine suits us best.

Going alongside a river would have the advantage of being generally downhill. Must consider that. Canals are nice to follow (as we did in our first trip, through France) but they are full of surprises, where the canal climbs hills or the bridle path jumps up over bridges or degenerates into parched lumpy mud ("C'est vraiment du sport, messieurs" as a canal fisherman remarked to us).

We didn't make all that much preparation, other than booking ferries, borrowing a bike rack for the car and looking on the web for "Cycling in Sweden" info. We always have a destination in mind but it can be changed; everything is freely improvised on the road.

We are relatively experienced now; this was our third trip. On our first we had to buy a pump, an allen key and a corkscrew in the first few days out.

My brother is a very experienced sailor though; he has sailed around the world on a catamaran he designed and built.

When I was a kid we sailed around the North Sea. Once, in Oostende, we met a Danish couple with a young girl on a home-made cat. It really was made out of stuff from the junk yard. The mast was a low voltage overhead power pylon - a mini Eifel Tower. The little girl took us below and taught us (only about 12 and 14 ourselves) to count up to 10 in Danish.

Which I have now forgotten how to do.

I'll have another look at the cycling possibilites along the Rhine. If you follow it from Switzerland up as far as at least Bingen, you wll get to drink wines better than anything you could imagine. The natives keep the best for themselves, of course. And the emphasis is shifting to red wine.

Appetite whetted

http://www.bad-duerkheim.de/html/Tourismus_/Englisch/The_Palatinate-where_fine_wines_gently_caress_the_palate.htm

Says more verbosly what I say in my own entry on the subject. Once you've stumbled past the first sentence, which seems to have part of it missing, the rest is in quite readable English.

And my husband confirms that you can bike from the source (Sedrun in Switzerland) to the estuary at Rotterdam. Sometimes you have to circle round something, (nuclear power stations, paper factories) but you can cross over the other side when that happens, I expect.

The Rhine is 1324 km long.

Ah, a three-weeker. Is Bad Dürkheim your neck of the woods? Looks good. I fancy the half-litre wine glasses

Aah - I thought you might even go up one side and down the other.

Bad Dürkheim is about a half-hour drive from here. My son's girlfriend is from there. On Friday night I shall be meeting some friends (English and American ladies) in Bad Dürkheim at a place called "Das Weinrefugium". Sounds nice.

I visited the Hartz Mountains once with my brother-in-law who lives in Braunschweig. Wunderschön!

Google takes you to Tasmania if you look for "Hartz Mountains".

Did you keep up the sailing or was it only a childhood thing?

My father used to sail when he could, and I always enjoyed it. But (see my "child abuse" story) we were never allowed to actually do it ourselves, and anyway we only sailed bigger yachts, so if you put me in a dinghy, I'd know what ropes to pull but I couldn't get the thing moving myself.

We spent one or two holidays on boats when we were small. My parents spent nearly every summer before we were born sailing on the Norfolk Broads.

In the 60s, my father sailed regularly to Holland, Belgium and France every year with men friends. For a period - around 1971 - 1980 we had our own boat and did a few trips as a family (boyfriends were very welcome, as they made useful deckhands). I'm talking 36 ft catamaran here - followed by a 24 ft two-master. (Forgotten what that was exactly)

This had always been my father's dream, but my mother was never really enthusiastic. So as they got older, they sold the boat and moved to a bungalow. Now they are too old even to walk along a beach.

As I live 1000 km from any water (a fact which seriously depresses me sometimes) I don't have much opportunity to do any sailing. My husband is too German to "mess about in boats" - thinks you have to know all sorts of stuff first. The kids hanker after it and I would have liked to send them on sailing courses and holidays, but they have always been so involved in their Church Youth groups that their summer holidays since the age of 12 have been full of youth camps - first taking part and then organising them themselves.

Obviously, you can sail anywhere really, but it's expensive in Germany, and once you've been on the sea, you're not interested in pottering about on the Rhine, or its myriad lakes, which are more swamp than decent patches of water.

So that is the sorry tale of my nipped-in-the-bud sailing career. Fate prevented me from getting there before Dame Ellen. And now my back probably would.

I'm never really quite sure where the "Harz" mountains are. They are to be found near here, and are also the mountains to be found at the border between what used to be East and West Germany.

It must be a kind of German "Massif Central"

Ah, that intrusive t. http://netco.netco.de/tourist/karte/karte_x.html gives a map for tourism in Harz showing an area from west of Goslar to Sangerhausen. I think Goslar is where we went.

If you call them ropes you are about the level of sailor I am. My brother would call them sheets.

Ellen is made a dame? Proper order.

Oh yes, I know a halyard from a sheet from a cleat from a boom and all that jazz. I also know a lot of probably obsolete navy jargon which my father used. His sailing career (as an East London boy) started when he was in the Indian Ocean during the war. He was actually an instructor, at least, that's what he tells us.

On checking that link .... thanks - now I know! Perhaps the person talking about the "Harz" near here was just a little confused. I remember my kids having to learn all the mountain ranges in Germany in geography at school. In fact I learned them with them, but you tend to forget things you learn in old age.

And - what's the name tag about?

Apparently there is a word in the Greenlandish language that means "you simply cannot pretend not to be hearing all the time". See F19585?thread=508032&skip=644

I looked at your Entries list and couldn't find the "child abuse" story. Instead I read Gnomon's entry (edited by you) on Wagner, and wrote to the anti-semitism thread attached. Shows how busy I am; and we're off to New York at the crack of dawn.

About sailing; I gather it's expensive everywhere -- a friend defines a boat as "a hole in the water surrounded by wood into which you pour money", and says you can experience it cheaper by standing in a cold shower tearing up banknotes.

Well - I don't expect you'll be online again before you go, but have a good trip, anyway!

PS it wasn't an entry on Child Abuse, but a journal entry after returning frustrated from a visit to my parents where I had only just realised - fifty years on - what a terrible job of bringing me up they had done. With the best intentions, they (well, my father really) had whittled my self-esteem down to a tiny inconsequential speck.

They f*** you up, your Mum and Dad
They may not mean to, but they do . . .
~Philip Larkin