Mainz - Hermeskeil

It snowed lightly overnight.

Breakfast was spent with Renate, our American German friend, telling us pretty much the same things as she did the day before about how terrible the American education system was. She also gave us some useful information on shoes and leather - leather is much cheaper here and so shoes that we had seen for €20 weren't necessarily incredibly bad quality. We had been thinking that our shoes didn't have enough grip in the snow and ice so she suggested we try a particular shoe shop.

We had to be out of the hostel by 9am, so we vacated and left the car there to walk into town to go shoe shopping. I couldn't find any I liked with either good enough sole or were comfortable enough, but Tim found some good sturdy boots for a reasonable price.

After our shoe shopping expedition we headed out of Mainz to Hermeskeil. The night before Tim had gone over our maps and had written down the route to take, including names of towns and road numbers, which really helped, so our trip was relatively easy. We did however find that spray from other cars made the windscreen incredibly dirty, and once the sun came out it was almost impossible to see through. The problem was that we hadn't yet worked out where the knob to spray water on the windscreen was, and we couldn't find a place to pull over to check. I tried to assist by getting the car manual out of the glovebox,and reading out the German to Tim (complete with appalling pronunciation) and he eventually guessed enough of my mangled German to work it out. Finally we could see again!

Hermeskeil is a small town and the Youth Hostel wasn't nearly as big as the one in Mainz. We had chosen Hermeskeil to stay in because we really wanted to stay in Trier, but the Youth Hostel there was booked out, and Hermeskeil was the closest from there. The lady at the front desk showed us our table for our meals (you couldn't just sit anywhere) which was in a small room, and we shared the room with about 6 other families who were holidaying together. There were lots of Americans also staying at the youth hostel, apparently on a Christian retreat. It was quite weird, as there didn't seem to be any dedicated meeting rooms in the hostel, so you would turn a corner and discover a group of Americans sitting at a table (virtually in the corridor) having a bible study. I don't know how they concentrated!

We went for a walk after we had settled in and had our lunch. First we went to the tourist information centre and got a few brochures on Hermeskeil and Trier, and walked through the very small museum display on the town. Apparently there was a concentration camp nearby. We then walked through the town, where I found a wool shop, so I bought some wool and needles to knit a scarf for a present. We also found a $2 shop which had some nice Christmas decorations, so I bought a whole lot both for me and for presents. We also finally found a post office to buy some stamps for postcards. By this stage it was getting quite cold and slowly darker, so we went back to the youth hostel and attempted to translate the knitting instructions I had been given for the scarf. I transliterated it with Tim's help and that of a German dictionary, and though I couldn't totally translate it after about 1 and a half hours I was reasonably confident that I was knitting the same pattern I had seen in the shop.

At dinner the other families quizzed us about why we were there, and where Tim had learnt his German.