THE HEADER
The top portion of the screen on a blog is called a header and here includes our own recent photograph of the Traben side of Traben-Trarbach, our domicile on the Moselle River (German Mosel). Traben-Trarbach is a twin town of about 6000 inhabitants, with the inhabitants divided on two sides of the river.
The header photograph was taken at dusk on January 25th of this year, 2009, standing on the Trarbach side of the bridge looking across the river toward Traben. It was a totally wind-free evening where the Moselle River (about 300-400 meters across at this point) looked more like a clear lake. There was not a ripple to be seen.
In the size-reduced photograph below, we have taken half of a daytime panorama photograph of Traben-Trarbach found at the Starkenburg website, the town which overlooks Traben-Trarbach, though the photograph is taken from near the Grevenburg Castle ruins which tower above Trarbach.
We have marked a section of the photograph with lines and labels to show which part of Traben our own photograph represents. The yellow lines show the breadth of the full photo on a 22-inch screen. The light blue line shows the approximate limits of the photo as visible on a smaller screen. The large dot shows approximately where we were standing when we took the photograph. The orange dot in the upper right hand part of the picture shows where I am sitting right now, writing this posting.
In its glory days at the turn of the 19th century to the 20th century, Traben-Trarbach was an extremely wealthy city, ranked as the second leading wine-trading center in the world (after Bordeaux). The wealthy wine barons at this time built many of the Art Nouveau buildings found in contemporary Traben-Trarbach.
The oldest building in Traben-Trarbach, the Aacher Hof, is located in Traben, and dates to 830 A.D. In the header photograph, Aacher Hof is located in the dark group of buildings near the brightly lit building in the center, the so-called "miraculous" Art Nouveau Jugendstil Hotel Bellevue.
The name of the blog, LawPundit, has been integrated into the header photograph and a clickable, floating link for Traben-Trarbach is found in the lower right-hand corner of the header.
Since our website is conceived optimally for 22-inch monitors, which are quickly becoming a standard in computer usage, anyone having a smaller monitor will not see the full header photograph, which stretches clear across the top of the screen from the art nouveau Villa Nollen (the lighted building behind the W in LawPundit, see image), to the four-star **** Bellevue Hotel (the lighted building to the right of the T in LawPundit) to the four-star **** Moselschlösschen Hotel (see 360° panorama) next to the bridge (at the right in the photograph and not visible to smaller screens).
Traben-Trarbach also has a five-star hotel, the Ayurveda Spa viz. Resort Hotel ***** Parkschlösschen, which caters to guests from all around the world. The Parkschlösschen has a parkland location in the valley in which Trarbach is nestled and can not be seen in the header photograph, so we have an arrow there instead because it is two kilometers inland.
Traben-Trarbach is a popular but yet peaceful tourist destination frequented by seven overnite visitors per year per inhabitant, which ranks the Middle Moselle Valley 2nd in Germany in this category, after the Baltic Sea's Rügen, Germany's largest island. This popularity of the Moselle region among tourists explains the great number and variety of accomodations available in Traben-Trarbach and why a town of only 6000 people has one five-star hotel and two four-star hotels, not to mention countless other accomodations. Many tourists return to Traben-Trarbach and environs year after year, especially for the many wine festivals in the Moselle Valley.
