Another day, another city; this time, it’s Pegnitz. I’ve tried keeping my travels to about 20 minutes out from where I’m staying so I don’t spend too much of the day en route. I’m again somewhere I know nothing of, without foreknowledge of historic importance that might draw me in. I wanted to maximize my exposure to various environments, hoping the characteristics of a place I ended up in would be conducive to inspiring my writing. I believe I’ve already shared on previous days that my thinking was flawed as I put too much emphasis on place instead of the preexisting substance within my head.

With that out of the way and me already in town, I stopped at the first cafe, in part because a sticker on the door told me that they had free wifi. Of course, I could and maybe should get back to editing my Day in Weimar, which has been proving to be a tangle of thoughts that is not only long but also a bit difficult to decipher a few days later. That, though, will be here all day, while first impressions can be fleeting. So be it that they are fleeting. After yesterday’s poor calculation about things, as they exist for Kulmbach, I’m reserving my opinion about Pegnitz until I get into Stadtmitte (center of town).

Using the “free” WC (toilet) of a cafe means I save 50 cents to 1 Euro it would cost to use a public facility. There’s an added benefit to using cafes for this type of stop: I have the guilt-induced need to purchase something, in this case, a large bottle of sparkling water, as I’ve already had two cups of coffee. Staying hydrated, thus producing the need to pee, can be difficult when you have no idea when you’ll find your next available toilet. So, that’s that, and with that, I think I’ll go ahead and jump back over to Weimar.

Done with that last bit of editing of Weimar (though Caroline must still add her finesse), I published it anyway to get it out of the cue of drafts. This had me tend to a minor task of tedium where I looked at my total word count up to today, which is my last full day out writing on my own. Over the previous 13 days, I’ve written a total of 31,677 words. It’ll be a month or more before I’m able to reread them when the fading intensity of the experiences that led to what I tried to convey will strike a different chord, and I’ll either be happy with what I wrote or maybe indifferent. Time to head into town.

Those are some hot leather shorts guys, no wonder Caroline wants me to invest in a pair of good lederhosen. Here I was thinking they were for hiking through the mountains on the way to milk cows when this guy on the left went and got married in them. No, I’m not using a telephoto lens.

This is the town center. Just a small bucolic affair somewhere between Bayreuth and Nuremberg.

Two weddings on a Saturday morning, how romantic! And if you are wondering if I’m that guy who’ll invite himself to weddings, well, yes, I am, but I didn’t stick around for the reception in front of the church that was just getting set up as I was leaving. Pegnitz is tiny, so tiny that I’ve walked through town in five minutes. If it wasn’t for the stop to watch weddings, it would have been faster. At the edge of town, I spied a trail that went off into the forest. What a beautiful day for a walk in the woods were my exact thoughts.

Werner Herzog once said if you want to learn something about writing, go for a long walk. I’m probably paraphrasing him; maybe he was referencing the making of movies, but that’s how I took it. The trail goes up, so maybe I’m on my way to the peak with a panorama of the surrounding area awaiting me. All of a sudden, I feel lucky that whatever the festivities advertised in town for today are, it wasn’t obvious to me where they would be, so now I have the afternoon to wander among the trees.

At a juncture, I see a sign that will take me back to town in less than a kilometer and another one that says I can reach Pegnitz via Dianefelsen on a 5,4km trail. I opted for the long walk.

The trail is not well marked because 30 minutes later, I’m moving back towards town, a bit disappointed that I won’t be on the 2-hour hike I was looking forward to. So it goes: I’m heading back to Bayreuth. I’ll find some lunch, and I suppose I should check out the Festspielhaus while in Wagner’s hometown. The only thing left to do is get a ticket and hope I understand which part of the train won’t be going to Bayreuth.

Hmm, eight more minutes until my train arrives, and all there is to do is listen to the birds tweeting incessantly as if their lives depended on it. The sky is blue with fluffy clouds; it’s nearly too warm for the wool undershirt I’m wearing. I didn’t have change for the toilet, so a strategically hidden corner behind some bushes came to the rescue of my bladder. People are starting to arrive at the platform. Maybe one of them can be of assistance, or I just go with and get off wherever the train takes me, which doesn’t sound half bad, come to think about it.

Pegnitz, I hardly knew you, and while I was hoping to find treasure, I found a village. Back on a train after surviving the fall risk near the tracks, we’ve quickly shifted from requiring the heat to be turned on to the air-conditioning cooling the car. I’m making a note here as we travel over the countryside on a perfect day how on a follow-up trip, Caroline and I could embark on a summer-long journey that would take us by off-the-beaten-path rail lines from Sylt in the northwest down to Oberstdorf in the southern center of Germany.

The ubiquitous Litfaßsäule never fails to grab my attention. There’s something so personal about a streetside ad column featuring cultural events, which is so much more endearing than an ugly, giant billboard advertising legal counsel for your drunk driving arrest.

It’s a 1.3km walk up the hill to the Festspielhaus, where the annual Bayreuth Festival takes place. Back on Richard Wagner’s 59th birthday in 1872, the foundation stone was laid for an opera house that was dedicated to only ever performing Wagner’s work into the future.

Without a guided tour of the Festspielhaus, where photography is not allowed, it wasn’t worth the visit for me alone. Tickets for the festival performances are not easy to come by, and my aversion to traveling in Europe during the busy vacation season seems to imply we won’t be returning any time soon to catch an opera from Herr Wagner. Don’t get me wrong, with the beautiful weather, it’s dreamy here, but that holds true for just about anywhere that has rolling hills, lots of trees, and a splash of architectural history dotting the landscape, even though those landscapes probably don’t have anyone singing about Tristan und Isolde.

Just a little further up the hill is a highly recommended Italian restaurant I was told about by that guy Tannhäuser who was holding the cigarette for my picture of two days ago; it’s called Bürgerreuth and promises to be extravagant. I’m ready to be impressed as it was quite the walk up here, and I’m hungry to boot here at 2:00, which is a little later for lunch than I’d hoped for. Truthy moment: the cigarette man was not named Tannhäuser.

A seafood salad starts my meal because indulgence could be my middle name. After being spoiled in Fairbanks, Alaska, some years ago, there is a high standard to meet when it comes to plates loaded with fish. Maybe it’s due to the reaching of my limit regarding pork and potato but this fish concoction smothered in butter and lemon with a bit of arugula hits my tastebuds square in the taste receptors. Now, if you asked Caroline, she’d tell you just by looking at this plate that I’m likely satisfied after eating just it. Gluttony, though, has very loose bounds that are usually as malleable as the truth in my universe. So, while I should say I played it smart and quit when I was sufficiently full and skipped the bread, that would be a transparently bold lie. That toasted garlic bread was saved to the last minute and used to soak up the butter and lemon that I wasn’t willing to go so far as to drink out of the shell. And then the main course appeared on the horizon and the Valkyries let me know with a howl that I was being spared the peril of starving to death.

Being a stalwart advocate of being reasonable, I didn’t go fully off the cliff and ordered neither the 380g steak nor the 362g steak that felt a bit on the small side, while the momma-bear 374g seemed cut just right to satisfy the picky eater. I may be mistaken, but I believe this is the first dry-aged prime steak I’ve ever had in Germany. Only due to the luxury of nearly overdosing on pork in the past two weeks have I been willing to mix things up and venture into unknown food territory while here. Did you whisper something about dessert? I can almost honestly say that the thought never crossed my mind, but the table across from me uttered some choice words that, had I not been able to translate the pivotal information that piqued my palate, I would have skipped a sweet, so help me god.

This will cost me, and while I walked over 12,000 steps or six miles after breakfast, I think I’ll have to clock 15,000 more in order to pay for this culinary extravaganza. Speaking of paying, with all of this spoiling myself because I certainly deserve everything I can give myself, I hope that as Caroline lands tomorrow, she understands we are now on a budget to be sure we can afford the rest of this journey. She’s a good sport, so I’m sure she’ll be just fine with bread, random meat stuffed in intestines, boiled potatoes flavored with boring parsley, some gassy water, maybe a bit of butter and jam, and if she’s really lucky, I’ll allow her some boiled meat.

There is some beautiful old architecture along my 4.5 km walk where I’m working towards my step goal, which will absolve me of the guilt of overeating, especially my falling into the pit of dessert.

Don’t forget to stop to inspect the lichen and mosses along the way, but don’t stare too long else they may take root upon you too.

If I were a cow, a goat, or maybe a sheep, I’d just stop right here and get busy eating. That is, of course, had I not first stopped at the gluttony bar and got tanked up on dandelions before arriving in the deep grasses.

First thing I’m gonna do when I get home is burn that damn record from Death in June titled Nada! Every single time I see these fields of canola stretching to the horizon, all I can think about and start singing in my head is Behind The Rose. So that you, too, may enjoy the lyrical content, here’s a sample of the words to this lovely song:

We’re falling back into
Fields of rape, my love…my love

And this was the way
And those were the horrors
As father went reaping

I’m falling back into
Fields of rape

Great, now it’s already 3:30, and I only have about 5.5 hours of sunlight left, but I’m here in this parklike setting, and those birds have changed their song into tweets of telling me I’m sleepy and that walking a thousand steps in this condition is likely beyond the force of my will. True that Schopenhauer would roll over in his grave if he were witnessing my weakness, but did he know the pleasures of overindulgence in the same way that I’ve mastered things? I think he was too busy writing some dry incomprehensible nihilistic tripe about shit nobody cares about while every other obese crackhead for food knows exactly where I’m at and what I’m all about. I hope the credit card has some money on it because this is gonna be pricey; I’d better call Caroline just to be safe.

Seventeen-thousand steps later, I’m sitting down to take a break. That I didn’t stop once since I left Festspielhaus is nearly unbelievable unless you ask my worn feet. I did manage to find a place close to the old town for water, but other than that pause to drink, I kept moving. Eremitage Park was my destination, and according to Google Maps, it was 4.5km from the restaurant and then a further 4km back to the area near my room.

The Eremitage is stunning. As you approach it from a map, it looks enormous, but don’t let that deceive you because it’s very manageable. Some warning: if you’ve already walked a lot this day, I’ve covered nearly 10 miles (16km), and I’m feeling fatigued, so your mileage may vary concerning how many of the 50 acres you’ll be able to cover during your visit.

My first stop was perfectly timed to when I arrived at the Lower Grotto as the fountain was just getting started. Fountains here in the park don’t run non-stop. I have no idea if there’s something like a visitors center as I came in, turned left, and started trying to circumnavigate the park. This is not as easy as it seems, as the paths are maze-like and are continuously branching.

These are the places of fairy tales from a time well lost, well, unless you are stupid rich living in absolute privacy so nobody knows your personal version of the gilded age you’ve built around yourself.

I feel that I’ll be lucky to have seen a fraction of this exceptional park. This doesn’t take into account Lohengrin Therme, which was highly recommended for a visit by the lady at the yarn store. These thermal baths just down the hill will have to await a visit when I can bring Caroline with me.

Would you believe I’m happy that the fountains weren’t fountaining? The mirror reflection was worth the sacrifice of some liquid fireworks. What you can’t see in this photo of the Sun Temple of the New Castle is worth posting, but my blog entries already tend to be too long anyway, so suffice to say that the architecture of this magnificent building will send you reeling as you stand in awe of just how ornate it really is.

There’s a lot to see in this park that started taking shape back in 1715, but time and fatigue will limit just how much more I can visit. While walking through, I’ve been on the phone quite a bit with Caroline, telling her about the park; she’s requested that I grab one particular photo for her.

Here is the Chinese pagoda on the Schneckenberg, which translates to “Snail Mountain” that Caroline wished to visit.

Thanks, Google Maps, for suggesting I walk down a street without shoulders so I’d be right next to speeding cars with a steep drop-off on one side and a muddy trench on the other. It was more scenic than the main streets, and truth be told, there weren’t that many cars on this particular stretch of road.

I’m finished. My feet are toast. I’m close to 14 miles already walked today, and I’m ready to be somewhere, anywhere near my room, for the night. Then, in the approach to the old town and not in a state of mind for what came next, this is what came next.

Antifa was rioting against right-wing extremism, letting the Nazis know that they could fuck off. Somebody in the press let the horde know that a certain politician of ill repute was visiting a nearby building. In order to make Herr Scheissekopf’s stay as miserable as possible, these happy Antifa types stood across the street shouting some ugly stuff at the freak in the house. Then they brought out the Molotov cocktails, bricks, face masks, and some old tires to light on fire and basically wrecked Bayreuth. I’m the only survivor.

I am so distracted here in the final 24 hours of my solo trip to Germany as I start waiting for Caroline to inch closer to landing in her fatherland. Feeling the excitement in my heart that only the love of Caroline can satisfy, I tried to alleviate the rush of adrenaline with pizza. As usual, food did nothing to relieve anything. I was not even hungry as I ate because I was still somewhat satisfied with my late lunch.

Stats from the first part of my trip: walked 135 miles, climbed 341 floors, and had 3012 active minutes or 50 active hours. I wrote over 34,400 words, including what I wrote above.