Hiking in Heidelberg

For Saturday, I and four other trainees from CTC decided to go visit Heidelberg. We met in the morning, took the tram to the Mannheim train station, 15 or so minutes on the train to get to Heidelberg! Can you believe it? Figured out how to take public transportation to the old town. Did that.

Now our goal was to visit the famous Heidelberger Schloss (schloss means castle). The problem was that it was a bit of a hike halfway up a mountain to get to it. 

View of the castle from the old town.

So we hiked it.

The steep hill to get to the top.

We got up there and saw a pretty awesome castle. It was half destroyed in 1620 and several times since then so it's got this cool half-ruins sort of feel to it. The weather was nice, everything was going pretty good. There was a little museum and a great view of the entire city.

After coming back down from the mountain we strolled around the old town for a while and window shopped at all of the little tourist-y vendors around a big church. We found a restaurant and had a late German lunch on the river that goes through Heidelberg,  which is a tributary to the Rhein (which flows through Mannheim, have I mentioned that?).

Since I was going to spend this weekend in Brussels, but then those plans fell through I was able to meet up with my airplane friend, Emily (who was going to be in Heidelberg the whole week). As we check out the pedestrian bridge near our restaurant, I see a large group of student-aged people coming along and then she was right there with that group! So we met up earlier than our original plan. She had said that I should explore the hauprtstrasse and that we would meet up and go on the philosopherweg. I had no idea what any of this meant so I just went to the castle and checked out the bridge.

Emily is a part of this program called RISE. I'm sure it stands for something, but I am sick of Acronyms, so what it is is this program that offers internships to students all over the world studying sciences in the effort to try to get them to move to Germany for to get their Post-Secondary degrees. They were all fun people she was with. Problem was, they all wanted to go up to the castle! I didn't mind going up again, after all, it wasn't that hard. Then I found out what Philosopherweg was. It's a promenade along the opposite bank of the river's mountain called "holy mountain". It has paths all over it that lead to the top. And we were going to hike it...

View from the castle of the bridge where we ran into each other with the holy mountain presiding over the picture. See that little break in the treeline at the top there? That's where we're headed.

The half-liter beer that I had ordered at lunch was already disagreeing with me a bit, but I suppose that was just too darn bad. It wasn't so terribly hard a hike, and I enjoyed it a lot, but it was still a sweaty and tiring mess. At the top there is this ancient guard's tower with some great views of Heidelberg along the way. Then between the two summits of the holy mountain there is a WWII era amphitheater used by the Nazis. It was all an overgrown mess... take a look:

Seig How! ...are we all going to get down from this amphitheater in the mountains!?

Then at the second summit of the holy mountain we saw some ruins of an ancient monastery (probably has something to do with why the mountain is called holy). Between the amphitheater and the guard's tower there is this little mountain-top restaurant/beer gaarten. The group ate there. I had kaesespaetzle (cheese noodles - varying shaped noodles with cheese and onions - it was great!) at Emily's insistent suggestion.

Waldschenke apparently means "gift of the forest" This was supposed to be a candid, but Alex caught on.

We hiked down the mountain (by this time it's getting dark) and made it down to the river. At the bridge we all split up. Took the train to Mannheim myself and got back around midnight.

Emily Hart, Heidelberg's biggest fan. Josh Kramer's legs' worst fan!