Making Lemonade

Our first weekend in town, we wanted to go hiking at a mountain our professor, Herr Mainka, suggested. His writing is not quite legible, and he explained all of the directions in German. We got most of it but were still unsure of our route. Also, not having the internet access didn’t do us any favors. We bought tickets in the right direction and just went with it.

Halfway to our final destination, we had to change our route. We got off in Bonn to buy new tickets and transfer trains. The train we purchased tickets for ended up getting stuck (I think), and we had to “wing it” to try to get to our final destination. We looked at the schedule and a train was coming in a minute. It was headed the right direction, so we jumped on.

When we reached the destination partway between Bonn and our final destination, we exited to transfer again. Off in the distance you could see a mountain with what looked like a giant church and castle ruins. They looked really cool, but we didn’t know if we could get there. Also, we were already headed somewhere else. As it turns out, the only train headed where we needed to go was the one that was cancelled. Great… Now what? Time to go exploring and see if we can get to that mountain!

We started in that direction and bumped into an elderly woman. We asked her if we could get to the church and castle, and she said yes! She gave us directions and told us we needed to take the “Fähre”! None of us knew what that was, but we could definitely get to the base of the mountain now. As it turns out, Fähre translates to “ferry” in English. Now we were headed to this mystery mountain and taking a ferry across the Rhein River!

Across the river was a small town called Königswinter. This was exactly how I pictured Germany. Old styled buildings, brick streets, church in the center, and mountains in the distance. Along the way, we had to stop and ask more people for directions. These small town folks were super friendly and very helpful in getting us to our final destination. Again, we didn’t understand everything, but they collectively got us where we needed to be.

In the end we got to climb the mountain up to “Schloss Drachenburg” (Schloss = castle, Drachen = dragon). What is better than dragons and castles? Nothing! What we thought was a church was actually a more modern castle that was very beautiful inside and out. The ruins were part of an old castle on top of the mountain. All of it was part of a tourist attraction, and I can see why.

People are disregarding the beware of dragons sign...big mistake.

Our group climbing to the castle

    

After finishing the touristy part, some of us chose to hike the nearby mountain. We decided that we would hike straight up instead of using the path, which led us to something incredible! We made it to the top and found ruins that were not accessible my any ordinary route. I would imagine it was some sort of lookout tower.

I played in the little stream. Needed to test my waterproof boots.

Overall, we had an excellent day. We didn’t make it to our intended destination, but we went somewhere awesome. We took the lemons we were given and made some pretty awesome lemonade, plus we got to practice some of our German along the way!

            

                                Our departure from Königswinter                  Justin attempting to break into a secret tunnel