Better your boots than your booty.

Before we get into this:

Let’s talk about Trier - the town we stayed in last night before we began our week of hiking along the Mosel/Moselle River. It was “founded” (the Celts were here first) by the Romans in the late 1st century BC in the name of Caesar Augustus. Trier is considered Germany's oldest city and was one of the four capitals of the Roman Empire in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries. It has Roman baths, sports (the gladiator type) complexes, colosseum-looking gardens and one of the oldest churches in Europe, begun by emperor Constantine. It belonged to France several times, among others, over the centuries and today lies only 6 km from Luxembourg.

Yep, Karl Marx’s hometown

Anyway, OK, back to the hike. The stats look something like this:

Perfectly flat the whole time (you can tell that from the elevation profile above).

Distance - 12.5 miles

Temp - 50’s

2 rainstorms

1 mudslide

It was during this day that we developed these words to live by - If you have to submerge any part of yourself into the mud, BETTER YOUR BOOTS THAN YOUR BOOTY.

Oh yeah, one other thing. Beware of your spouse saying bravely optimistic things about the weather or trail conditions. Less than one minute after she said, “it’s not supposed to rain until late this afternoon, but I suppose the skies could open up any time,” that the skies opened up and we went diving in our packs for our rain gear. And..it was only a few minutes after saying, the trail’s wet but at least we don’t have to deal with a hillside of mud,” that we encountered a hillside full of mud.

Scenes from the day.

This was the new trail sign we watched for. The Moselsteig (German for “steep trail by the Mosel” or words to that effect) is only 10 years old and the signage, although quite good, is not as developed as that of the Rheinsteig which is nearly 20. Wrong turns, or lack of turns, happened, but our GPS track routinely saved us from ending up in Luxembourg or wherever.

One could occasionally find a sign like this and imagine you were on any trail you wanted to be on and go any direction you wanted to. We figured things out the first time about 97% of the time.