The day started with finishing yesterday’s writing while doing laundry in a machine that took a few tries to get going. Out on the still-cold streets of Erfurt, I knew exactly which bakery I wanted to stop at for a breakfast sandwich on a heavy roll before heading to the main train station. With a day ticket good for traveling across the Thüringer region I was ready to stop at Coffee Fellows for a Cafe Latte and a bit more writing prior to my train leaving.

My idea is to head into Gotha first, and then later in the day, I’ll move over to Mühlhausen before returning to Erfurt. Until then, I’m indulging in the reliving of my youth sitting here in a train station, finishing my Frühstück (breakfast), and watching the cavalcade of people go by.

These smaller rail stations operate in waves as opposed to the larger stations in big cities that remain constantly busy. It can feel nearly empty here, and then a train pulls in with a rush of passengers flooding into the main corridors aiming for the exits. Two minutes later, things return to calm.

The train I’m boarding this morning only runs once an hour, so there’s an imperative not to become so entwined with my writing that I lose sight of the time. Without the ability to focus and find flow this feels stilted and hard-fought for. This is where reading a newspaper works well. Of course, very few people are reading those today, most are looking to their phones for whittling away the time. That path of least resistance grabbing at instant gratification feels like cheating on capturing experiences instead of investing in oneself. Insert the tone of the grumpy old guy here.

This has me thinking of just how this is different than sitting at a Starbucks back home. For starters, I’m at a place where travelers are moving through. Some are going on adventures in a nearby city or maybe off to a regional airport where they’ll go on holiday to some exotic location on Earth. You can visit a train station again and again and rarely do you see the same people twice, besides the ones that work at the concessionaires you visit. Today I’m one of those people who is not only on holiday, but I’m about to take off on another adventure within the one I’m already experiencing. With that, it’s time to walk over to my track and get on the train.

I find it amusing my nervousness when finding my track and where exactly I’m supposed to be. No matter how many times I’ve done this there’s always a nagging fear that I’ll somehow misread something and be at the wrong place at the wrong time. There are always details I miss when reorienting myself with how the system works, such as sitting in seat 22, row 12 on car 14 instead of car 15. It’s now three minutes before my train arrives, and I have 97% certainty that it will be on time. My time on board will be a brief 20 minutes, and I have all of the excitement of going to Gotha as I had on leaving America to fly into Germany.

The train ultimately goes to Eisenach where Martin Luther translated the Bible out of Latin and into German while at the Wartburg up on the mountain. I’m not going that far today; Caroline and I were there five years ago on a previous visit to Germany. Eisenach is also the birthplace of J.S. Bach, who figures into why I’m going to Mühlhausen today. As a note, this regional train does not have wifi available. Instead of staring at this computer screen, I’m going to use the time to stare out the window at the rolling hills and billowy clouds as we get underway.

Into the town of Gotha with the appropriately named Schloss Friedenstein Gotha. This palace sits at the top of the hill, looking back at a museum and forward to town. With only a brief couple of hours before the train leaves for my next stop, I didn’t have the time to tour the exhibits, maybe on a subsequent visit with Caroline.

Heading downhill, the fountain I passed was spectacular and nearly impossible to photograph without a drone to get an overhead shot. The town is a small and pretty affair with a city hall as you enter the main shopping area. It didn’t take long to pass through, but on the way, I did make an extra stop.

I found another maypole. By the way, that spectacular fountain I mentioned, you are only seeing a tiny fraction of it as it extends downhill in a series of cascades that when at the bottom of the hill you look back at four or five levels of thing.

The Margarethenkirche or St. Margaret’s Church was open via a side door, and as luck would have it, there was someone up at the organ playing. I sat through four pieces before departing to see what else I might find.

When I first entered the church, the piece that was being played came to an end, followed by a long pause. I could see the top of the organist’s head in the mirror, so I said thank you for the bit I was able to listen to. The woman at the organ looked up to see me standing in front of the nave and smiled. With that, she returned to playing though it was an upbeat, almost jazzy piece of music that sounded like it could have come from a contemporary play.

I probably said it ten times last year on our Churchstravaganza Tour, but I just love these cherubs.

Maybe I should wax on about my love of stained glass? These ancient monuments to God are also monuments to humanity’s ingenuity and sense of the aesthetic. Regardless of its symbolism and anybody’s feeling about deeper meanings found in the various religions of people, it is without question that much of the art of humankind has originated in our observance, respect, and fear of the unseen and unknown.

I walked over the grounds of the palace on my way back to the train station, where I was given one of the day’s highlights. I came to a class of kindergarteners who were out walking with their “handler.” She told me her official title, and it wasn’t teacher, but I can’t remember her description. So after I was informed that it was a violation of privacy rules to photograph children without their parents’ consent, the lady struck up a conversation to find out where I was from. Learning I was American, she brought the kids closer and asked them to demonstrate that they could count to 10; they did great. Next up, they translated the names of colors from German to English, and finally, they told me their names beginning with, “My name is…” Some of them were seriously intrigued by this strange American guy speaking German and English, though it was far more English than the former. I’d venture to say that their German language skills eclipsed mine by a kilometer or more.

There was plenty of time to spare as I sat down in a cafe to wait for my train and do a little note-taking. All too soon, the train was pulling up, and I had to shut down and hoof it over to the track.

Twenty minutes later, I was pulling up in Mühlhausen for the walk to the Divi Blasii Church. I thought this was the location where Bach first performed Gott ist mein König, but I’d left my notes in the room in Erfurt, so I wasn’t sure. The guy behind a counter selling souvenirs let me know that I had the wrong church for that performance and that I needed to walk over to Marienskirche (St. Mary’s Church).

Would you believe that everything you are seeing is painted in the trompe l’oeil style? Yeah, neither would I. That guy behind the booth had a hearing problem, and subsequently, the inherent speech pattern made it more difficult for me to understand him, so the translation was on another level of incomprehensibility. My first question would have been if any part of this organ existed back in Bach’s day.

This small corner of the church held the most intrigue for me as it appeared to be a place of penance more than a place of worship. Maybe this is as good a time as any to give thought to the Protestant Reformation, as I’m in the heart of where that movement began. Not Mühlhausen in particular, but this general corner of Thüringen where Martin Luther threw down the Ninety-Five Theses and soon thereafter the Church of England appeared and threw their hat into the mix of chaos and the Western world devolved into a special kind of mayhem where things like torture were thought to be able to bring people back to Catholicism. This tumultuous period came to an end around the time hostilities in the Thirty Years’ War came to a conclusion. To say this was a pivotal time in history is an understatement, as this division was going to have ramifications for centuries to come. In comparison to modern Islam, one might say things are the way they have always been: bordering on lunacy.

Today I once again failed to find God. I was told that I would find him here in his house of worship; why is he him anyway? I was told I would find him in my heart. With my head underwater, I have a life-threatening reality of not finding air. Swallowing air, I can burp, but I do not satisfy my need for water. I can eat my words, but I’m still hungry. I collect words and resequence them into my own expressions of perception, or I board a plane, and if I’m fortunate, I land in someplace I’m returning to or visiting for the first time. When I turn to God, I cannot find the essence or even a morsel of hope that satisfies my curiosity to find that which is all around me.

Maybe my soul has lost its way and the thing that is the most obvious is directly in front of me. If so, I am blind and contentedly so. Those of the faithful might say I’ve not sought God out, or I’ve not fully accepted him in my heart. Well, when I was younger and without bias of disbelief, I said my prayers and went to church, but still, God left me alone with the iron fist of a tyrannical society that was trying to convert me into a pawn of its own needs.

My path to adulthood was one of strife where, as far as I was concerned, God had long ago hocked a loogie into my soul if indeed I even had one. For all the parts of my body I did damage to growing up, I never once cried to a parent that my soul was in agony. It’s not that I wanted to avoid God to be difficult or to enhance finding my inner edgelord, but Jesus Christ, if God and his son are so prolific, wouldn’t someone somewhere have captured something in the art or on video of just a little something that would allow a collective gasp by humanity that miracles or the hand of God just laid down the majesty from the Kingdom of Heaven and that we should get our shit together posthaste?

I’m starting to get the impression that yarn bombing is becoming a national sport here in Germany. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen anyone yarn-bombing a public object. Could this be the sign from God that he does, in fact, work in mysterious ways, starting with knitting seat warmers of brightly colored remnants of yarn he no longer needs?

Arriving at Marienskirche, I wanted to be extra certain about the details supplied by the guy back at Divi Blasii, but the lady at the counter didn’t even know if Bach had ever played there. However, she had phone service that I’ve been struggling with and was able to look up the piece of music I was referring to, and sure enough, it was first performed at Marienskirche.

I took up a spot in a pew, and with my earphones plugged in snugly, I turned on BWV 71, also known as Gott ist Mein König. The effect of tuning out the ambiance of the church created a listening experience that was too isolated. Another aspect of the experiment is that the church is no longer functioning as such; it is now a museum dedicated to Thomas Müntzer. Funny how even as an atheist, I sense the missing presence of God in a house that used to be dedicated to the worship of the idea of such an entity.

I was naively looking for a transcendent experience, maybe even the opening of a wormhole in the fabric of time, so I could transport back 300 years and find a hint of what it might have felt like listening to this piece of devotion. Instead, I took the opportunity to listen to it in much the same way as I’ve always heard it. Oh well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I cherish these views where all reminders of modernity are hidden from view, and for a moment, I’m standing in another age. Of course, I don’t miss the smell of animal shit, human excrement, urine, or plague-carrying rats that might have been running around. Then there are things like hot water running into the shower at my lodging that are incalculable luxuries that we often take for granted. Hmm, for everything I don’t want to encounter and everything I require for my comfort, I wonder if what I’m really looking for is the Disneyland version of history.

Over to the edge of the old town, I found the hidden small entrance that takes you up a tower and onto a 350-meter length of the remaining old fortification wall. The view from the first tower was worth every penny of the 5 Euros I spent to acquire my bragging rights of having been there and done that. After climbing a few of the towers, I decided I’d had enough for one day of narrow, steep wooden steps and instead focused on the narrow walkway on the wall. The moat that was part of the fortification is long ago emptied of its alligators, sharks, and aquatic dragons.

Walled fortifications with lookout towers were the best defense for the day when marauding dickheads were on the prowl looking for booty, food, wenches, a few new soldiers to replace those that died in the last drunken raid, and maybe some hostages if anyone of importance happened to be in town. Most walls are now gone, replaced by nuclear weapons, figuratively speaking, of course, but on occasion, we can find a few remaining sections reminding us what it was like when we needed to escape the shit, plague, and stench of piss below.

Think about it; this view is almost identical to one someone fifteen generations ago back in 1569, would have seen. The price of this time travel is simply saving your shekels until you’ve amassed enough to carry yourself up some narrow old wooden stairs out in a small town 218 miles (351km) from the nearest international airport. Pray to the deity of your choice that some idiot below isn’t riding the horn in his car to spoil the effect of being there.

These are the kind of stairs you’ll be navigating as you move from tower to tower.

Sweet God, the idiocy of believing I need to share so many photos to adequately allow others to explore where I’ve been or maybe refresh my memories when I’m near death’s door should I be forgetting that I’ve lived a charmed life is starting to wear thin. I could opt to simply post a photo with some minor amount of location data, but what fun would that be in forcing me to wrestle something profound out of my head so as to impress my future self with how smug I was in the arrogance of my youth? You might think that 56 years old is no longer my youth, but experience tells me that the 80-year-old version of John will look at this younger version with contempt.

Ah, the sweet fields of canola. What the serious fuck was America thinking when they decided that “rape” needed a more user-friendly marketable word and thus came up with canola. Did someone consult Engelbert Humperdinck’s parents?

I’m back in Erfurt now, where these cobblestones late in the day have been known to blind people with the incredible glare that shines off of them. I swear that I’m not lying or even exaggerating this: I promise. Had I not taken this photo through a welder mask, I, too, might not be able to see these words I’m writing at this very minute.

Dr. Molrok struck here, but destruction is striking back at his work as age attempts to remove his fading artwork.

This puppet maker has one of the coolest shops I’ve ever been in. I’d spotted his shop two days ago when it was closed, and I peeked in. I didn’t visit the next day as it took me this long to stumble upon it again. Someday I should learn to use my phone to mark locations that I find of interest.

Oh, look at these cuties. I have no idea if these are seriously large ducks or a type of geese. Momma bird was keeping eight babies warm under her wings. I probably stood across the creek for 15 minutes watching them be cute parents.

I don’t know if the national bird of Germany is the swan, but one wouldn’t be blamed for thinking that there’s a good chance it is so. Another Thüringian meal has been captured in the basket of flavors.

My time here in Erfurt is most recognizable from this central shopping mall location where my walks got underway in the old town. There’s nothing very special here as far as history or cool shops are concerned, but this is a reminder of the skyline in the early evening and the beautiful street trains that rumble down the center of the arcade. While I’ll walk until it’s well dark, this is the stopping point on my report for another busy day.