Once again, it was Saturday morning, a time when I would normally set off on my bike into the nearby Bienwald forest. And that’s exactly what I did this morning as well. After breakfast, my wife and our child headed off to school, which had scheduled an open house for today. Unfortunately, that didn’t fit into my plans at all, and I had to immediately dismiss my wife’s suggestion that I bike to Landau instead. Strong winds across open fields made that idea almost suicidal.

So I planned my usual home loop of roughly eighty kilometers, which normally takes me past the Kandel Naturfreundehaus and onto a beautiful MTB trail. The trail begins just before the wooden hut at Murder-Alley and ends more or less at the German-French border near the Bienwaldmühle. From there, I usually continue along the Lauter, essentially riding directly along the border. Another beautiful trail, a bit more demanding than the first and with a few tricky sections. Like a roller coaster, it climbs gently up and down.

Along the riverbed of the Lauter, an almost surreal landscape has developed. Head-high ferns line the path through a naturally grown mixed forest. Normally, I follow the trail all the way to Wissembourg, then via Schweighofen tackle the first ascent into the Palatinate Forest, the German foothills of the Vosges.

While the first part of the route is relatively flat, the second part is ideal for training climbing endurance. From Rechtenbach to Dürrenbach it goes up, then down again to Bad Bergzabern. Through the valley and up the final climb to Birkenhördt. Down to Selz, then via Klingenmünster and Steinweiler back to Kandel. All in all, 80 kilometers and 1,200 meters of elevation gain. Sometime during the summer, I had decided this was my ideal training route. And today, I wanted to conquer it again.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get the chance.

It all started on the German side of the border. Somewhere between Weißes Kreuz and the Bienwaldmühle, the forestry department had blocked off the forest paths with red-and-white tape. Laminated printouts dryly announced: Driven Hunt – danger to life

Unfortunately, the responsible officials had neglected to include essential information. None of the signs mentioned when the hunt would begin, or—more importantly—when it would end. Recklessly, I decided to detour around the hunting area. These zones are usually only two or three kilometers wide and can be bypassed fairly quickly to rejoin the usual route. So I did exactly that.

Still, the restricted area struck me as unusually large.

My detour led me directly along the road from Weißes Kreuz to the Bienwaldmühle. There, I crossed the border and continued my tour on the French side as usual. You have to cross a major road to enter the trail via a parking lot. The first section went very well. I even managed two particularly tricky spots without falling or getting off the bike.

Suddenly, a very old man wearing an orange-red vest leapt out of the nearby bushes and shouted: “Attendez Monsieur, attendez! Chasse en cours, chasse en cours!”

I don’t need to mention that I was terrified and felt my heart nearly stop. What did this gnome want from me, and why did he have to scare me half to death? Just before I could throw my bike at his osteoporosis-ridden body, my foreign-language center finally sent a message mentioning hunting. Slowly, it began to dawn on me.

Ah. So that’s how the French do it.

Back home, the old guys shoot, and if they’re lucky, they hit the wildlife. Over here, the young ones do the shooting, and the old ones sit down inside the hunting area. If they’re lucky, retirement sorts itself out quickly. Vive la révolution!

In any case, I understood that I needed to get out of there immediately, as a hunt was underway. A big hunt. An international hunt. A Central European hunt.

“Alright,” I thought, “I don’t want to get in the way of European hunting cooperation, nor do I want to fall victim to it.” Fearing that a pan-European hunt might even include Belgium and the Netherlands, I decided to bypass the hunting area toward Karlsruhe and thus toward the Rhine.

So I rode along the main road —normally forbidden for bicycles —toward Wissembourg. Strangely enough, I didn’t encounter a single car. I was worried that my French skills wouldn’t be sufficient to explain my situation to any police officers who might appear. They tend to suddenly forget German when it suits them. Apparently, Wissembourg was free of police but completely surrounded by the hunt. All known exits were blocked with barriers.

So I took the only route left to me: past the hippodrome toward Lauterbourg, then Berg.

As you may have heard in the news, something significant was happening in the otherwise peaceful village of Berg that very Saturday at noon. It was suspected that the train carrying Castor nuclear waste containers to Gorleben would cross the German-French border there. Yes. That Berg. The destination of my detour.

The Berg where hundreds of protesters were sitting on the tracks. Where locals advised their children not to leave the house for fear of the next combined pepper spray and water cannon deployment. And yes, the Berg that was hermetically sealed off, forcing me to take yet another detour — this time back on the German side.

Suddenly, everything made sense: the hunting party, the complete absence of French police, and the sudden presence of German police —normally a rare sight in the Southern Palatinate. By the time I finally made it home, I had my 80 kilometers on the odometer, but I was anything but relaxed. I was frozen, having ridden across open, wind-exposed fields instead of sheltered forest paths, and completely exhausted.

I didn’t sit down on the tracks.
I didn’t chain myself to anything.
I didn’t rappel from any bridges, because I find the logic of that action utterly baffling anyway.
And unfortunately,
I didn’t have the right gloves for track ballast removal..

But I did think about what a protest against the protest might look like. Letting people remain chained to the tracks overnight? Making sure bridge rappellers can’t come down again? Forcing every ballast protester to lay a kilometer of track by hand?

I had many wonderful ideas while pedaling home, freezing. Admittedly, most of them would not have aligned particularly well with the Geneva Conventions. But as the French say: Vive la révolution!

In the end, however, I was glad that my energy was renewable. Because just one hour after thawing myself in the bathtub, I was ready to protest again:

Against Castor transport protesters who waste our tax money, make railways unsafe, ensure that you can’t get to the ‘Super U’ supermarket—and who turned my weekend ride into a weekend ordeal.