Claire Gebben

Wolf and I go way back. In 1975, he studied at Orange High School as an AFS student. My family hosted him for half a year.

“Your father lived with my family,” I tell his daughter Luise. “We were like brother and sister.” She and her friend Charlotte giggle in the back seat of the tiny, European model Mercedes.

The last time I visited Wolf was in Berlin in 1988. Back then, we had to enter East Berlin through heavy passport checks and tight security. Our visit was limited to a few hours.

Now Wolf’s psychotherapy office is a seven-story walk up in old East Berlin. To meet him, I take the S-Bahn tram to the Nordbahnhof and exit at the site of isolated remnants of the Wall along Bernauer Strasse.

It’s hard to believe such an ominous era of Berlin history is now filtered through this quiet park exhibit.

In Marburg Angela took me inside a Lutheran Church on the hillside, just beneath Marburg’s signature Schloss (castle). As we enter the church, we pass by stone statues of the dukes. “The church and power were all joined together as one,” Angela whispers.

The Dukes expelled the Catholics. In the new millennium, beneath the whitewashed walls, the old Catholic paintings emerge.

On the way down the cobbled hill, I’m delighted to spy an Amsel — the European blackbird (the females have brown feathers). Such a soft, sweet warble, and according to Angela, a cheeky temperament. They’re known to eat the seeds from the ground after planting.

Time to journey to Berlin, on the hi-speed ICE train, to the town where history is erased and reclaimed. This Sunday will be the annual celebration of East and West German unification. Wheee!

This is it, the big weekend of Freinsheim Food and Wine Hiking – the Kulinarische Weinwanderung. Today, after a week of warm “old woman” autumn, it is suddenly windy and cold. (A result of fickle nature – other years it has been almost too hot.) No matter, the wine keeps us warm.

We wander among the grapes of many varieties and sample vintages and culinary delights, for example sheep’s cheese (Schafskäse), grilled outdoors on a barbecue constructed from a former wine press.

Relatives and friends join us along the way, and near the end I get to taste “new wine,” available only in the autumn. It tastes (dangerously) innocent, like grape juice, but packs a wallop in alcohol content, something like hard apple cider.

The Weinwanderung, held in the fourth weekend of September, has been a tradition for around twenty years — May it live on for many centuries to come.

The Rhine River  flows north; Wednesday Dave and I slithered beside its picturesque banks on our railway journey to Cologne.

Our destination was the “Dom”, the sooty, funereal spires in the heart of the city. The Cathedral was begun in 1248 and took over 600 years to complete (approximately 300 years of construction, with time off between 1560 and 1842). Just as it was completed in 1880, the coal-burning era arrived. The Dom is incredible now — no doubt it will gleam like heaven once it’s polished (cleaning is underway).

Dave and I arrived two-by-two, but some tourists arrived by the busload. And boatload. Pleasant weather made it possible to stop in Remagen for dinner, to enjoy cold Kölsch along the Rhine while carrier ships and oil tankers, sight-seeing boats and cruise ships peaceably shared the swirling waterway. A U.S. Navy cargo plane even made an appearance, tilting and winding at low altitude, flying upriver.

The journey gave new meaning to “timeless Autumn”. Roman ruins and medieval castles, Renaissance art and industrial artifacts all mingled together with twenty-first century living.