Visiting Eltz Castle

If you don't have access to a car, it isn't easy to reach Eltz Castle. There's no train access, since it's a castle up in the hills. Bus service is intermittent because it's partway between Koblenz and Trier – which means it's not near anywhere. For a normal plebs like us, visiting the castle at Eltz was a distant goal. Until the Hungarian family arrived in a car for a visit and were easily convinced to take on a road trip to Eltz Castle.

It's a two-and-a-half drive from the Dorf to the entrance of gravel parking lot on the Eltz estate where you pay the old man a couple of euros to park. If you roll past him, as we saw a Dutch family do, he will shake his fist at you until you return to his booth and pay him.

Then you walk into a nature reserve and hike a half kilometer along a forest trail that goes around a hill, edging a deep ravine. Eventually, you turn an outcropping of basalt and there's the castle, standing on a rocky crag in a valley.

It's then that you appreciate the difficulty to reaching this place. As a veteran of Neuschwanstein Castle, I was half-expecting crowds of people, sausage vendors, pretzel pushers, and kiosks serving frosty glasses of Weissbier. There's none of that tourist nonsense near Eltz castle. It's just a castle surrounded by nature.

Appreciating the Bigger Things

It doesn't take long for a´commuter to develop a mental cruise control. They could walk to the train station, catch their train, and get off at the right stop in Aachen blindfolded or, more likely, asleep. Occasionally the commuter gets to shake things up, like working in the Cologne office.

Cologne! That place with the tasty beer and the pretty cathedral and where people speak their own version of German. It's my second office. Once or twice a week, I can shake up my commute and get off in the Big City. I can ride a tram along the river into the city's industrial southeast, where I sit in a quiet office and tap away at marketing words.

The commuter's curse is developing a tunnel vision, if they're not sleepwalking to work. They get so used to their ride to and from work, and are so wrapped up in getting to where they're going that they develop blinders that block out the things that make a commute bearable.

I'm a big believer in appreciating the little things – like trains with a bar that serves frosty pints of beer (even if they don't call them pints here) – and the big things we take for granted so easily that they become little things in our minds. Like the Dom:

There's not a day where I step out of the Köln's main station and I look up and think "Holy shit! I'm walking past this architectual wonder again." Of course, as I slow down a gawk, an irritable commuter bumps into me and mumbles, "Sheiße!"

The End of my Elternzeit

My parental leave is ending and my morning rituals won't be the same.

It was at 6am when I paused and took stock of the situation – newborn son strapped to my chest to prevent him from crying while I baked a batch of healthy oatmeal cookies for my wife as she got a precious couple of hours of uninterrupted sleep – and thought: this is paternal leave, this is perfect.

I couldn't tell you what day it was, because I'd lost track of them. The newborn mother's life revolves around feedings, while a newborn father's life revolves anything he steps up to: diaper changes, healthy dinner prep, walks in the park, tea-for-wifey-making, and other tasks that gobble up the day and makes you focus on what must. Get. Done. Now.

And it's during that hustle and bustle that I've found time to stop and take it all in. That's when everything else – work, chores, lack of sleep, the rest of the world – recedes from view and I focus in on this little man and his mother and enjoy the moment.

It's like a tunnel vision of love.

And I wouldn't have been able to appreciate those moments, let alone live in those moments, if I wasn't on parental leave. And that's not just my own selfish reasoning. Helping around the house, taking care of my wife, bonding with my son, and adjusting to the enormity of fatherhood are all important benefits of a man’s parental leave.

How does parental leave in Germany work?

New parents in Germany get little over a year of paid leave that they can share between the two of them. But it gets confusing from there, since the time is as flexible as putty. I had a colleague who became a father and took most of the parental leave, while the mother returned to work shortly after their son’s birth.