A Nazi Monument in the Centre of the World

"Wewelsburg Castle a Nazi monument"

Day Hikes in Germany Hiking Past a Nazi Monument

Considering the big shadow the Third Reich was once (and, up to a point, still is) casting over Germany, there are relatively few places in the country that can still give you a whiff of that old Nazi sulphur.

There are, specifically, only a few examples left of what you could call “Nazi architecture”. While most towns and cities still have buildings from the period between 1933 and 1945, as well as

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Hiking in Romania

"Bran Castle,Romania - Photo by Horia Varlan"

Guest Post: Hiking in Romania by David Elliott

Romania is the ideal country for great hiking trips, with a range of different landscapes from the soaring horseshoe of the Carpathian Mountains to vast plains and river valleys, not to mention some of the most stunning medieval castles on the planet.

Like the other countries of Central and Eastern Europe, Romania was for centuries a bulwark of Christendom against the Turks and has seen some eventful history. There’s a resurgence of

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Easy Hiking and Riesling in the Palatinate

"A glass of riesling from the Palatinate Germany"

Hiking in Germany  Hiking and Riesling in the Palatinate

Courtesy of Wikipedia

There are certainly regions in Germany with a higher profile than the Palatinate – even the natives of this part of southwestern Germany would probably accept that without objections. The Palatinate’s problem is that it is a little “stashed away” at some distance from the busy transport routes that link Germany’s main economic regions.

Opportunities of first encountering the Palatinate by just “passing through” are therefore rare: you

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Blood, Meat and Beers in a German Culinary Institution

"Koelsch from Paeffgen Brauerei"

German Culinary Institutions part II, and today, we’ll take you one notch up to a proper restaurant. (No offence, Profi-Grill, I still love you.) This one is a few kilometres down south from Wattenscheid to Cologne, hub for many a trip to hiking trails in Western Germany.

German Culinary Institution of Päffgen

is a brewery, and, as every visitor to Germany knows (or should know), brewery-restaurants are as sure a guarantee for good food as any you are likely to

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Fields of Dreams

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Hiking trails do not go through forests all the time. As a visual respite, we welcome scenic fields  from time to time, too. And during all our hikes, we have certainly seen quite a few dramatic field landscapes.

Our Hiking Fields of Dreams

This is the field in Auvers sur Oise that has inspired van Gogh’s  painting Champ de Blé aux Corbeaux. Well, the wheat evidently went AWOL as did the crows on the day we passed by.

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