Saturday April 7, 2012

We said goodbye to Bacharach this morning and headed to a castle ruin of Berg Rheinfels. Built in 1245 it used to be the oldest castle on the Rhein.  It was bum freezing cold but really interesting and spooky in places. There's a walking tour and thankfully a translation in English. We did the first one but chose to not take the 2nd tour down and into the caves and tunnels that require a flashlight or at least a candle, both of which you can get at the ticket station for a couple Euro.

From there we headed to Ilbesheim.  I was anxious to see it since that is where I've been able to trace the Darner (Doerner / Dörner) name back to 1595. With our perfect timing of course we were there the day before Easter and nothing is open. Its also a very very small town with only a couple restaurants but lots of wineries.

Downtown Ilbesheim is not very big :) 

We asked our very kind waitress if she knew any Dörners. She said they were a big family and that she knew one of the older women just passed away at 90 years old.  I didn't have the guts to go knock on their door the day before Easter especially since they probably don't speak English. The waitress was able to communicate with us but only mediocrely well. Nate's German is not so great so we would have just stood there smiling trying to explain why we were pestering them. I asked if she knew if they were winemakers and she said no. She asked the owners of the restaurant and she translated back that the current Dörner was a teacher. :)

Not really sure what's up with the monkey but there were a few of them on the street signs. I remember reading something about them on their website but I still don't understand if its just a cute gimmick or if there are really monkeys somewhere.

We did find the word for cemetery in German (Friedhof) and asked the waitress for directions.  There we found several different headstones with the name Doerner or Dörner.  I took pictures of them all. There were a couple of people nearby watering plants on graves or cleaning up the areas. We must have looked very strange walking up and down each row looking for the family name, but they just smiled and nodded at us.

The oldest relative we could find buried there was born in 1861 and died in 1914. I've yet to find how he's connected as the Dörner we come from immigrated to the US in 1740 something. I'll be digging on ancestry.com for a while to find them.

I spotted an old church on a hill and we found the path to walk up to see if there were any more graves. There were none but the church was worth taking a picture of and the elevation gave us the opportunity to take some great photos and video of the valley.  I could imagine grandpa Darner living here. 

We then headed to the hotel to check in and blasted the heater on the way.  If its this cold in April I cannot imagine how bad it is in January!

The hotel we're staying at tonight is outside of a bigger town nearby called Landau in der Pfalz. We headed into the larger town to get dinner and see if we could find a grocery store given that everything will probably be closed tomorrow.  Grocery shopping in another r country is always an adventure. We walked out with some bread rolls, salami, fruit cups, two bottles of wine and some dark chocolate. It will be dinner for tomorrow should we not be able to find anything open.