It was a hot June evening. We still hadn’t spent a night in the Bulli. We had some sausages. What would anyone in Remagen do under those circumsatnces? Technically, barbecues on the Monte Klamotte (specifically at the Otto Neubeck Grillhütte) should be booked in advance. But these were coronatimes – bookings weren’t possible, barbecues weren’t allowed. We were 2 people with a tiny picnic grill and a few sausages, so we thought we’d take our chance.
There were still a number of sunset dog walkers around when we got up there, so we decided to hold off on the pyrotechnics until after dark – just in case any were interfering busybodies. We ended up on a bench, with a beer, marvelling at the sun sinking over fields of rapeseed, putting the world to rights with a couple walking 2 dogs.
We set up the grill, despite there being a few stragglers (3 young card players in the dusk). We must’ve had to go back to the van 3 or 4 times to fetch things we’d forgotten of course – rookie errors. Darkness, fireflies, silence, sausages. We even managed to start a small campfire. This sounds like proper bush survival stuff, but dry grass, twigs and larger branches had already been stacked by someone before us, and we had paper and lighters at our disposal. It still took us about 20 attempts to get the thing going. The smoke billowed upwards as a fine indication to passing patrol cars of our whereabouts.
No one came, the fire died back and we went to bed, the Bulli bed.
