From 1983 to1988, I lived in a German-style townhouse in Hagenau, a bedroom community just outside the village of Baiersdorf, about 10 minutes north of Erlangen, a small city about 20 minutes north of Nürnberg in what was then West Germany. I owned a motorcyle — a Honda CB500 — and every couple of weeks in decent weather I'd tool on up into Fränkische Schweiz — translated into English as both Swiss Franconia and Franconian Switzerland — a lovely region of thick forests and chuckling rivers and quaint little villages. My first stop was usually a small church atop a high hill, where I'd sit on a park bench and gaze across the valley spread out beneath me. Then I'd wind back down the hill and continue to the trout hatchery shown in the photo above, where I'd toss pellets of fish food to the live ones in the growing pools and eat a freshly smoked one and sip a liter of good German bier before heading home. After Becca was born, I'd take her with me — by car, not motorcycle! — and sometimes I'd carry her in her front pack down a gorgeous trails through the woods to the secluded Wald Café, where we'd sit on the deck and I'd feed her a bottle while sipping a cappucino and eating a slice of Black Forest cake. Sometimes, when company was visiting, we'd tour the Teufelshöhle cave system next door to the hatchery and stop at the nutcracker factory in Muggendorf to buy carved wooden smoking men (which broke apart at the waistline to hold a cone of incense; light the incense and reassemble the figure, and the smoke from the incense would drift lazily out of a hole in the character's mouth) and Christmas ornaments and little wooden men who climb up a string when you tug on it, and, of course, the carved people-shaped nutcrackers that are a regional specialty.

In the summer of 2001, after our summer in Italy, I brought 15-year-old Becca up to Germany to see the area where she spent the first two years of her life. We passed a lovely couple of hours in the Fränkische Schweiz — the church, the Wald Cafe, the nutcracker factory, the trout hatchery, the "Devil's Hole" cave. Everything was exactly the way I remembered it from 10 years earlier — and all, naturally, brand-new to Becca, who remembered none of it and enjoyed it all.

Return to Places.