oldtimers

We spent Sunday looking at oldtimers...while being accompanied by some oldtimers.

In the morning, great guy and I hopped on his ’76 BMW motorbike (a beautiful, but scruffy relic) and headed up into the hills to look at an oldtimer tractor and bike show. We rolled up to the entry tent and as the lady was about to tell us how much the entrance fee was, great guy said, ‘I’m actually riding an oldtimer, can we just take the bike in?’ She looked at us, a little suspectly, but then said, ‘okay, sure, go on in.’ Great guy was quite proud of himself that he saved us the 4 Euros!

Later, after looking at rows and rows of tractors in a field, and then returning home, another oldtimer rolled up to our house-the father. Well, he rolled up in his car and then, he and his not-so-oldtimer dog, Golfo, walked the rest of the way.

The 3 of us, plus dog, spent a really nice afternoon at the Wein-Höfefest (vineyard fest) around Burg Layen. Burg Layen is a little, rolling, wine town in a valley enclosed with steep vineyards. About every third house is a wine family’s hof (a hof is foreign to North Americans-it’s kind of like a farm yard, but can be right in the middle of a town or city, and in wine regions they are often very elegant and high-end places).

In Burg Layen, on this weekend every year, you will find wine tours and live music, wine tasting and excellent food, wine consumption and oldtimers. This particular oldtimertreffen (a meeting of oldtimer vehicles, in this case, cars at least 30 years old) weaves through the entire town. There were old porsches, mercedes, alfa romeos, bmws, rolls royces, and even some oldtimer Volkswagens. As Golfo and I walked a few steps behind great guy and the father (dogs need to stop every 5 seconds!) I found myself being quite interested in some of these oldtimers. These old cars had so much class and style…like black and white photos of the ‘20’s. I think these oldtimers should become the new trend, just like legwarmers and pleats.

The atmosphere of music, lots of people, sunshine and cool cars; along with classy wine höfe offering scrumptious smelling spießbraten or jägerschnitzel and delightful pouring riesling, weißbürgunder or dornfelder wines, all the while being surrounded by hills of grapes, was wonderful. Sorry, that is much too lame a word to describe the experience. One downfall of my improving German is that I have complete brain freeze when trying to think of interesting English words. Apologies.

A side note: For anyone wondering, really old tractors sitting in farmer’s fields in Germany look exactly the same as really old tractors sitting in farmer’s fields in Saskatchewan. Just saying…