(Saturday, Sept. 12) Our new cubicle mate is about our age and a retired “information technology” worker of some sort.
She’s got a rucksack and camera bag and is on her way south of Munchen to do some “vandering” (hiking) despite having to wear a splint to support her ankle.
She told us that she’s been to San Francisco, Chicago, Utah, Wyoming, and gone camping in the fourth states of the U.S. Desert \Southwest.
She grew up in the GDR (East Germany) and said some things are better, and some are worse, since the Berlin Wall fell and the both halves of the county were reunited.
At around 3:00 pm we passed Ansbach and were rolling along through corn fields and pastures with grazing cattle. I fell asleep about a half hour later and was awakened from my dreams when we reached Ingolstadt which Cindy mistakenly thought was Munich and the end of our train trip. An Audi auto factory is located here and train car after train car, stretching from the end of the station back toward the factory were loaded with brand new Audis heading off to dealers somewhere in the world.
This area is flat, like Sacramento County, with groves of trees here and there across the farmlands. As we continued south to Munich the flatlands gave way to rolling hills and we began to see hops growing on lines or wires strung between tall poles. Small town churches with the type of spire often seen in alpine communities began to appear along the rail line.
As we got closer and closer to Munich, sound walls protecting communities from the roar of passing trains lined the tracks. First these metal walls were green in color, then brown, then stripped light green and brown, then gray. Now and again the sound walls were defaced with graffiti, but as we neared Munich, this sporadic “tagging” turned into long murals of senseless scribbling.
Dense forested areas became rows of spindly individual trees, bare except for some greenery at the top, like to green cellophane that is attached to the end of toothpicks stuck into cherries when making cocktails at Christmas time.
When we were about 15 minutes from the Munich station, the farms disappeared altogether, but purple and yellow plants grew in cracks along the sound walls or between railroad ties.
