29 March (on the road with ghosts of '44/'45)
So after talking with my folks and wandering around, I had dinner at a Schnellimbiss...a Greek place. I had a souvlaki with french fries, fries so good I had to order a medium order in addition. Drank a bottle of Warsteiner beer, and at the end of the meal, the owner brought me a glass of ouzo. That stuff is liquid fire...but somehow just the right thing to drink after scarfing down grilled pork and fried carbohydrate sticks.

The next day, I got up early enough to have breakfast, pack, and check out. I left my rucksack at the hotel and walked around Stolberg for a couple of hours, taking a lot of pictures of the castle and anything else I could imagine my father having seen in the fall of 1944.

Since I knew my father had visited the castle, I figured that images of it would be familiar, especially since he told me why they'd gone to the castle in the first place.
"We figured that we'd never seen a real-live castle before, and chances were, we wouldn't be back again. So, we went to the Stolberg castle." At that time, he said, it was mostly a wideopen area..."not much to it, really."

Since the war, or actually since the Marshall Plan, the castle has been somewhat restored. The walls themselves have all been repaired, some of the catwalks are build with new wood, and the roofs show newish tilework. The church that sits just north of the keep looks like it probably did shortly after it opened its doors int he 16th century.
The Germans are real good at restoring stuff, in a meticulous sort of way.

Once my pictorial documentation work was done, I retrieved my rucksack, consulted a new 1:25,000-scale map I'd bought in the local bookstore (note to me: add info about wandring into a small bookstore on the fussgaengerzone, seeing books called "die Amis kommen!" and "Schlacht im Hoelle: Der Schlacht im huertgenwald"), i headed north.
I'd decided to walk to Eschweiler, the town north-northeast of Stolberg and the place where my father had spent most of his Fall of '44...as well as during the Battle of the Bulge. My idea was, even though I didn't know my father's actual route, I would follow a likely or even plausible route he could have taken...or atl east that perhaps other GIs had taken then.

After a breath-scuking hill climb (reminder: it really IS time to lose wieght!), I began to leave houses behind and begin to pass fields.
It always amazes me just how close the farms and coutnryside are to German towns...no oozing from city to suburb to strip-mall hell to convenience-store dribble, like in the States. Nope, here you're in a residential area and then boom! the cloying pungence of fresh manure
bangs against the sides of your nostrils...the sort of manure that comes from real, honest-to-god animals instead of some fertilizer truck.