Kellerwald-Edersee Trip
This trip was supposed to fulfill a number of things. It was a test-run for living in the bimobil for awhile. It was an opportunity to plan a photography-oriented trip. And it was a chance to explore a different part of Europe for us (and to actually see some hills). What I hadn’t expected was the fact that it was a badly needed break from work. Simply put, I was mentally exhausted and needed some time away from things. Among other things, the trip gave me that.
Not that getting there was easy. It seems that most of the western part of central Germany was under construction. At one point, a major highway was closed, and instead of having a defined detour route directing traffic around the blockage and back onto the highway after the construction, the guidance arrows went no farther than the bottom of the exit ramp telling you to go either left or right. And despite our having a GPS system where we’ve programmed our vehicle’s dimensions into it, it ran us down some roads that didn’t leave us much space to squeeze between cars (ok, that was because cars were parked on both sides of the road on a small neighborhood road). My switching onto Google maps didn’t prove any more helpful, and thank goodness I’ve become very attentive to underpass height signs, which forced us to turn around and find a route on our own. So the early part of the trip reaffirmed my hatred for GPS (the robots are far from taking over the earth, but if they do, we are truly screwed). What should have been a short 3-hour drive took us nearly 5 hours after the three detours / extended construction stops we had to make. Fortunately, the return trip was not as bad.
But get there we did. Before checking into the campground, we stopped by the Kellerwald-Edersee Visitor’s Center to get some ideas for the week. Then we hopped across the street into the campground where there were very few guests - one of the reasons why we like to plan trips in the very early Spring and after school start in the Fall.
The first morning greeted us with partly cloudy skies. We’d planned a decent hike we could take directly from the campground for the first day, just to not have to be driving every day. We chose a route that took us up the valley hillside, and then slowly worked its way along the ridge and then downward on the way back. Very quickly we were walking through farm fields.
And the early morning light offered great lighting conditions.
By distance it was roughly the hike we do most mornings in Didam, about 5 kilometers. However, one definitely notices that Germany (at least this part of Germany) has a bit of elevation change to boot. Still, that gives you the opportunity for some nice views up . . .
. . . and down the valley. The little village you can see in the image below is Kirchlotheim, a nice little village, and you can see the campground off in the distance as the Eder river makes its way to the Edersee reservoir.
Our hike (and most of them that week) was through the type of woodland landscape we’d been recently photographing in the Netherlands, so it was in some ways familiar, and in other ways (having a 3-dimensional landscape) different.
Overall, the first day was a very pleasant hike and was a good introduction/warmup of what was to come.
We chose the Kellerwald-Edersee NP as a destination for a reason - it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its ancient beech tree forest. The Heritage Site is almost a park within the park and you have to hike into it to get to the older trees, which can be gnarly and bizarre looking given the steep slopes they’re often found in. There’s one area where the oldest trees are more prevalent, so that was our goal for day 2. It was going to be a longer hike, but hopefully interesting gnarled trees would make the effort worth while.
And while you’re getting there, you hike through a mixed-woodland area that has its share of more normal beech trees.
While you find a fair share of simply amazing trees along the hike, the best of the trees are found well inside the UNESCO area and on very steep slopes, which makes photographing them very difficult. Yes you can take a picture of them (we opted not to, unwilling to climb the steep slopes), but photographs are near-impossible (as you can tell by google searches - all the pictures are of the same set of trees). We settled on enjoying looking at them.
That didn’t stop us from finding a few locations that let us wander around and make photographs, or of finding the occasional amazing tree in a location where you could make an interesting composition. But it was difficult.
One other thing I should mention. The hike kicked our butt! Instead of 5 km, it was just a touch under 7 miles (6.9 to be precise). This was definitely not the flat Netherlands, rather more of an up and down and up and down. And instead of going light like we did on Day 1, we carried full packs. And carried tripods. Both Ann and I were feeling our age by the time we made it back to the vehicle. Oh to be 40 again!
Fortunately, on our stop at the Visitor’s center, the information person gave us a few recommendations about other things to do and see in the area, to include visiting a near-by town that still had a decent historic center. It also offered the possibility of a good meal (most of the restaurants immediately near the park leave a bit to be desired). Our bodies told us that day 3 needed to be an easy day, so off to walk through a historic district it was.
Despite having a quaint look on the surface, the historic district was a bit depressing. Perhaps the whole area has been suffering (there were lots of protests written on giant hay bales along farms in the region), but the historic area was run down, most shops were closed (though a few are obviously “tourist shops” that haven’t opened yet for the season (which I think is easter given the preparations we were seeing towards the end of the week), and there was no decent food to be had in the historic district other than a cafe here or there. Given we were largely frustrated at the lack of decent bakeries in any of the small locals we stopped at on our trip, I got to wondering what’s up with all the changes in a country where in the past, excellent food was to be found everywhere and bakeries were a dime a dozen. Even Didam has 2 bakeries and 2 butchers within a 2-block distance of each other. Though I do have to say, the recommended restaurant was excellent, though it was outside of the historic district (on the other side from where we parked our vehicle). It seems the development of the town is focused outside the historic area, because once you left the old-town, things spruced up quite a bit.
Our next couple of days were spent hiking again. We did, however, pay much more attention to both the length of the planned hikes and the elevation changes. Days were a mix of overcast changing into partly cloudy skies and back to overcast. And the hikes were through woodland as we knew it would be.
One of the hikes took us to a church at the top of a “mountain.”
It has a nice view of the valley below and, upon finding that the door was open, we couldn’t resist going in given the obvious stained glass windows.
It was quaint and lovely inside with the colorful lights.
Proof that it doesn’t take much, other than a bit of design sense, to create a pleasant space to be in.
The nicest thing about these hikes is that there really was no destination. No particular thing to see. So we would hike a bit. Stop whenever there might be a photograph to be had, possibly to explore an area that seemed interesting. Or to just relax.
One of our hikes took us to a part of the park that looked over the Edersee reservoir. You can see the combination of village, farmland and woodland that is typical of the area.
And, of course, the woodlands to be explored.
Thursday brought us colder weather and pouring rain Thursday night. The forecast for Friday was not good (we were hoping for a clear morning to revisit a location from our first day’s hike, but to no avail). At one point during the trip, Ann had googled to find out how far away a camping store was that we had planned to visit on the bimobil pick-up trip that never happened. She was shocked to find that it was another 4 hour drive away. Yes, Germany is bigger than she’d imagined. Jokingly, I started googling other potential places to visit, thinking I would prove a point. It was with one of those searches that I found out that we were a mere 1 hour drive away from Wetzlar, headquarters to Leica. So when the photography prospects for Friday looked grim, we decided to take a road-trip on our road-trip
What can one say? We looked at great camera gear (old and new), saw some excellent photographs by Werner Bischof, caught some glimpses of the inside of the Leica factory, and wandered through the Leica gallery that had some . . . interesting exhibits.
On the way back to camp we had our second very good meal at a Gasthof just north of the park. It turned out to be a relaxing final day of our trip.
Despite our hopes that we might get one final morning of photographing in (… clear skies on Saturday morning to photograph at that location we wanted to revisit before we left?), it again poured much of the night and Saturday gave us cold, wet, off-and-on rain conditions. No fog, no sun . . . nothing photographically to keep us there.
That was pretty much it. We packed up and headed home. Our first real multi-day photography trip. We’re learning that photography trips in Europe are very different than in the US. We’ll just have to keep at it until we figure our routine out and how to get the most photography we can out of a very different landscape than we had in the US.