Every year, the club my husband belongs to arranges an outing to taste the wares of one of the vintners in our region. This wine-tasting evening has never really appealed to me because 1. I don't drink, and 2. it doesn't seem very child-friendly (= ready-made excuse to skip out). Hannah gets dragged to enough club-related events throughout the year that I feel she (& I) can safely give this one a miss.
This year, though, someone in the club suggested a Weinwanderung, which is sort of like a pub crawl, only walking along dirt roads in the vineyards from wine tent to wine tent.
John promised that there would be food and cake and other kids there, so once I agreed to go, Hannah was pretty much forced into going. I bribed her with a Happy Meal before we even got in the van to ensure her good behavior, but that only stopped her from complaining aloud. The waves of surliness rolling off her made me glad when she found another seat, away from me. But in just under an hour, we were in Freinsheim, which is near the more famous town of Bad Dürkheim on the Weinstrasse, or German Wine Route, which traverses the second largest wine-producing region in Germany.
As we were to learn, Freinsheim is relatively well-known among the Germans for this wine festival, but I was still shocked at the crowds we found on arrival.
When we go on a regular Wanderung up in the woods where we live, it is usually on a holiday, and so we expect to see lots of people, but it was even more crowded than that on the Weinwanderung, on a regular Saturday. People like their wine, I guess.
Another draw was the absolutely gorgeous weather that day. Stupid me, I neglected to use my moisturizer with suncreen that morning, so I ended up with a pink forehead. But I have to admit, having enough sunshine here in late September to get a touch of sunburn is like finding 50 bucks in an old pair of jeans--serendipity!
Moving on, it was nice to mosey through the vineyards, stopping to snap a few photos of the scenery,
or eat some grapes,
or get some food (cake and coffee in this photo),
or have a drink or 3,
or in this other group's case, have a picnic.
There was even a self-powered ride that Hannah decided she was too big for.
More likely, she didn't want to fling herself out of it. Yikes!
Funny story: this is where I briefly lost Hannah. We had already lost another member of our group--who actually ditched us, as it turned out, but we didn't know that at the time--so I was panicking when I couldn't find her. We were waiting for the other children to finish the ride, and suddenly I didn't see Hannah anywhere, not behind the ride or around the tents or across the road nomming on the grapes. I whipped out my cell phone and hoped she hadn't turned her phone off. Turns out she was sitting at her father's feet on the grass, *who I had been standing next to while scanning the crowds for my precious baby*. D'oh!
We also spotted a couple of items we couldn't quite explain, not being natives. Maybe they didn't know either, though.
Mutant duck advertising...?
Giant head representing...?(If I had known that John would need 10 minutes to buy a glass of wine, I would have gone up and read the inscription on this thing.)
Thankfully, I was able to enlarge the photo to read the name of this thing, because my google-fu had been powerless against my misspelled note, jotted in my Palm on Saturday. The location is called the Oschelskopf ("Oschel Head" or "Head of the Oschel", and I have no idea who, what, or where Oschel is), so the statue is named after that, but the locals apparently sometimes call it the "Elvis of Oschelskopf."
After we had done all of the above out in the fields, one of the club members led us on a tour of the town. The old city wall is still intact, so we followed it all the way around, which I think is about a kilometer long. It didn't take too terribly long, and the town was so charming. The path took us through narrow alleys,
covered walkways,
and once through a house.
Every turn brought a new, interesting sight:
Hannah really enjoyed the Wanderung, but when it came time for the tour of the town, she had had all she could take. Too bad for her that there was nowhere else for her to go, because the van wasn't scheduled to return for another hour at that point.
But as you can see from this photo of John, most of us had a great time.
For the rest of our pictures, see our photo set at Flickr.
