Rhino

We reached the most northern point of our journey through Germany:
Kap Arkona on the island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea 766 km air-line distance away from Nilpferd’s hometown.

Rügen is famous for its steep coast with the white chalk cliffs.
Like all tourists, we booked the tour by boat along the coast to admire the cliffs.
But then we noticed that there is also a possibility to hike directly at the foot of the cliffs on a narrow path between the Baltic Sea and the cliffs.
We did that one day after the excursion with the ship.

By chance, we saw that a guided tour of a military bunker was offered and we spontaneously participated.
From 1979 to 1986, a naval command bunker was built here by the former GDR, which was used as a command post for the Baltic Fleet.
Nilpferd as an Electrical engineer was very interested to see the old telecommunication equipment installed there and the devices used to maintain it.
But the facility had only a short life. On October 3, 1990, it was closed down as Germany was reunified.

And again we are a bit further north. The Mecklenburg Lake District has 1117 lakes, but we didn't see much of them. Either the shores are so densely overgrown that you can't see them, or the paths don't lead directly along the lakes, or the lakeshore is private property and therefore not accessible.
A supposedly very nice bike tour through the lake district was unfortunately a disappointment. It was 47 km, but it goes for miles straight on a cement road through the pine forest. Not really interesting.
If you want to enjoy the landscape here you need a canoe or a kayak, but we did not have that with us.
At least the campground was nice and it was located on a lake that you could actually see.
On the last day we didn't even try to reach more lakes by bike. Instead we walked on narrow paths through the national park. That was quite nice. Everything was overgrown with moss.

Our last day in the Harz Mountains. There are many rocks here and they look very different from the rocks in the Bavarian mountains. While the rocks in Bavaria are made of limestone here it is granite.
First we went to the Ottofels (Fels = rock), a popular place for excursions for tourists. Over almost 100 steps you can reach the highest point. Thanks to geocaching, then we found another rock that tourists don't know.

In this area there is a historic railroad with an old steam locomotive in operation.
But we preferred to walk. I think that was better, because we found a memorial stone, which reminds of the 6 people who died at a railroad accident.
However, that was in 1927. The locomotive had to be wrecked at the place of the accident.

We are back from Italy and just started another journey, but in the opposite direction to the north of Germany.
Although the city of Leuna has just 14.000 inhabitants it looked like Las Vegas. Gambling casinos and huge shopping malls.
A bit later we saw something very strange. There is an old construction, a watergate, in the middle of a meadow, but there is no river or water channel nearby.
It was built at the time of Adolf Hitler and when World War II started the project was stopped and the planned channel never was built.
We continued our journey to the Harz, a low mountain range, where we had planned to do some hikes.
In this region a lot of mines were in the past and you can still find the remains of them everywhere.
One cache was at an old electrical plant related to mining. The building is in the middle of the forest but the old paths are overgrown and no longer visible.
So it took us several tries to get there. Then we had to climb up a rusted ladder inside the building to reach the cache. What an adventure!

We are in the Dolomites in South Tyrol / Italy for 4 days!

Nilpferd has booked after 20 years again a photo workshop with one of the most famous mountain photographers.
During the last 20 years the technique has changed a lot and Nilpferd wants to update his knowledge.

The weather was very unstable, but we realized that this makes the photos more interesting than the sky being blue all day.

On the first day it rained, but we were able to photograph a rainbow.
For the second day we wanted to be on the Rosszahnscharte (2499m) for sunrise.
That meant leaving the hotel at 4:50am and of course we got no breakfast in the hotel.
When we started the hike there was thick fog and it was raining.
Nevertheless, we were at our destination on time for sunrise, respectively at the time when the sun was supposed to rise, but there was nothing to see except thick fog.
We waited up there for an hour and then the clouds finally cleared and we had a view to the mountains.
And the highlight of the workshop should be the hike to Mt. Schlern on Saturday - and that at sunset. But we still could not sleep late, because first again a sunrise tour (of course again without sun) had been scheduled.
We saw the sun only at noon, but at least in the evening there were holes in the clouds from time to time, which often only for a very short time allowed us the view to the surrounding mountains.
The descent was made with the headlight to an alpine hut where around 9:15 pm a cab was already waiting for us to bring us back to our hotel. There we spent another long evening at the bar because no hike was planned for the next morning at the time of sunrise.