On Sunday, while my friends Heather and Fitz were here visiting, I rented a car and drove us all out to the Rhine Valley. I'd been a couple of times before but never by car, and it turns out that having your own wheels in that area is pretty awesome: it means that when you see a sign that promises a view of three castles, you can jump in the car and drive up a goat trail for ten minutes instead of hiking straight uphill for a couple hours. We had a little trouble locating the third castle, leading us to consider redubbing the scenic overlook "two-and-a-half-castle view", but it was there, slanting into the green countryside in the distance.
I love a good
city and the
beach will always be where my heart lives, the landscape where I am most at home, so it's easy to forget that the countryside can leave me breathless with longing. I forget that I ache at how beautiful Germany's countryside is: Rosskopf's
golden checkerboard fields, villages tucked into the greenest of hills in the
Bavarian Alps and the Schwarzwald, even riverside fields just the slightest bit to the east or west of Frankfurt, trees along the water on one side and fields full of crops on the other, no sign of a city anywhere close. I don't feel stifled by the city, but when I leave it I remember that feeling I had when I came to Germany for the very first time, as a sixteen-year-old: the feeling that I wanted to soak in every bit of this country's beauty until I was utterly satiated. And there's so much of the German countryside that I've never visited, that I haven't even begun to know. Better hop to it.
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