Mark

We left our sweet set up in Oettingen and set out for the day earlier than we needed, but that is just habit. Before leaving however, we had a yogurt and fruit breakfast we’d purchased yesterday.

It was Sunday and you could tell because the town was completely deserted at this time of morning. Only the church bells ringing the quarter-hour (as they had all night) broke the silence.

Oettingen isn’t a large town and it wasn’t long before we were back in the country. Small hamlets dotted the countryside and most had little of interest within them. To make matters worse, the land was divided into rectangles, so our path was primarily a long straight line along farm fields.

Somewhere on a completely flat spot and for no reason whatsoever I got a sharp pain in my foot behind the big toe. Why it started, I’ll never know, but it plagued me most of the rest of the day, and we all had to slow down as a result.

This had the effect of making the monotonous straight paths drag on and on.

One of the roads was particularly straight and long and a plaque mentioned it was a Roman road (typical of those Romans to choose the shortest way between two points). Still, it was a bit of trivia that added a bit to the day.

More interesting was the Luftwaffe Air Field outside of Heuberg. The field is just now a flat grassy area but was once a large Luftwaffe training ground (1936-1940) and then a Luftwaffe air base used to harass British and later American bombers. It was also a work camp (mainly Russia POWs).

After the war, the area was converted to a refugee camp (mostly Sudetenlanders kicked out of Czechoslovakia). Surprisingly the last refugees didn’t leave until 1960.

The remaining bits of the day were not noteworthy other than our approach to Nordlingen when we met a few nice peeps and then stopped off at The Gospel House. It is a thriving Pentecostal church here in town (250 attend each week).

We checked into our lodging and got cleaned up before heading to the town center for some touring. Honestly it was mostly just a stroll through town, but we visited the St George Evangelical Lutheran Church and I climbed the impressive Daniel tower to get a birds eye view of the City.

I’d heard that the whole area was part of a massive meteor crater and I expected that meant some depression in the ground, barely perceptible. Only from the top of the tower did I see that the entire village out on the horizon was rimmed with hills. The whole valley we’d walked through today and perhaps some of yesterday was a crater. It was an impressive site.

Being Sunday no groceries were open so we opted for Italian.