Unlikely destinations

Joshua Hammer has an article in The New York Times about a trip you couldn't have made twenty years ago:

The first thing that struck us was the distance between the watchtowers. We had just cycled a strenuous mile uphill above the medieval village of Geisa, along the Iron Curtain Trail that follows the old Warsaw Pact-NATO divide in central Germany. Now, in the tranquillity of the early evening, we emerged at the top of the hill onto a verdant field adorned with European Union and German flags— and two sinister-looking structures that faced off against each other no more than seventy yards apart.
Between them stood a remnant of the original Iron Curtain fence: its concrete support posts had once been fortified with antipersonnel fragmentation mines loaded with an explosive charge of 110 grams of TNT and 80 metal splinters that could be propelled thirty yards in all directions. A German shepherd molded from concrete and painted in shades of brown and black, a classic piece of cold war kitsch, was tethered by a metal chain to a tree.
But it was the towers that demanded attention: the East German relic, erected in the early 1970s, was an ugly white column about forty feet high, topped by an observation slot and a bristling array of listening equipment. The American installation, dominated by an open-air deck, looked like a combination military post and lifeguard station— Seven Days in May meets Baywatch.
From 1953 until 1989, these watchtowers straddled the most dangerous border in the world. American troops from the 14th and 11th Armored Cavalry Regiments stared down East German soldiers just across the divide from their base, Point Alpha, waiting for the ground attack that would usher in World War III.
NATO brass believed that, in the event of a Soviet Union-led invasion of Western Europe, tanks and troops would pour across these verdant hills marking the westernmost extremity of the Iron Curtain: the so-called Fulda Gap, named after the largest West German town in the region. This cold war confrontation point even inspired an eponymous board game called Fulda Gap: The First Battle of the Next War, in which opponents plotted the invasion, and defense, of Western Europe.
After the Berlin Wall fell twenty years ago this November, Observation Point Alpha, as the GIs called this flashpoint, became an instant anachronism. The fence was dismantled, the soldiers withdrew, and— after a heated debate within the German government about whether or not to tear down the installations— Point Alpha was preserved as a testament to the tensions and absurdities of divided Europe.
Now this piece of cold war history is perhaps the best-preserved relic on the Iron Curtain Trail, a 4,225-mile network of bicycle paths that extends along the former Warsaw Pact-NATO border, from northern Finland to the Black Sea. In recent years, thanks primarily to the efforts of a German Green Party activist and European Union Parliamentarian, Michael Cramer, trails have been rehabilitated with financing from the European Union, and historical markers have been erected. A brochure with maps in German and English covering the entire route has just been published.
This summer, photographer Mark Simon and I spent a three-day weekend cycling a 100-mile section of the route in the German states of Hesse and Thuringia. Intensive fortification of this border zone during the cold war depopulated large swaths of the region and stopped all development, and today the route cuts across pristine farmland, beautiful villages, and nature reserves filled with wildlife. And, although most traces of the cold war era have vanished, military roads and observation towers still dot the idyllic countryside, imbuing pastoral Western European landscapes with a touch of Dr. Strangelove.
Mark and I caught the Inter-City Express from Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof early on July 4th, a fitting date, perhaps, to explore the former cold war confrontation zone. Three hours later, we got off in Fulda, an undistinguished town in Hesse 25 miles west of the Iron Curtain Trail. We rented 21-speed touring bikes and saddle bags at a bicycle shop just down the street from the train station, and followed signs to the R3, one of five rural bike trails created by the Hessen government out of 200 miles of disused railroad track.
The asphalt path rose due east through wheat and corn fields, dairy farms and lush pastures, passing roadside refreshment stands set up for cyclists, then plunged into the frigid Milseburg Tunnel— an eerie, milelong converted railway tunnel burrowed through the Rhön Mountains west of Hilders. Then it was a speedy descent to the frontier between Hesse and Thuringia, marked by a sign that read: Good Day, Dear Guest: You Are Standing Exactly on the Border of What Was, Until 1990, Divided Germany.
At Hilders, the R3 becomes the Iron Curtain Trail, and we veered north and followed it along the former border. After our day of strenuous cycling, covering about 35 miles, we stopped for the night at a country inn called Zur Pferdetränke (At the Horse Trough), in the former East German village of Schleid. This peaceful setting was once inside the East German sperrgebiet, the 3.1-mile-wide security zone that ran along the border with West Germany.
Gabriele Herrlich and her husband, Stefan, started Zur Pferdetränke just after the border opened in November 1989, and expanded it to nine rooms a decade ago. Over a hearty southern-German supper of schnitzel, fried potatoes and pilsner in the guesthouse garden, both recalled the surreal combination of tranquillity and paranoia that defined life inside this Strangelovian world. “We grew up with soldiers everywhere, with no visitors allowed from outside,” Mr. Herrlich said. “We all thought it was completely normal.”
Although American troops were stationed a mile away at Point Alpha, “we had no knowledge of that,” Mrs. Herrlich recalled. “It was kept totally secret.”

There are several more pages of text; click the post title to read them. Rico says that he was on the German border, though in Berlin, during the summer of 1969; it was all verboten then...