Whoever books these things where we have to wake at 4:30 to make 6:00 departures needs to be checked for sanity. Trying to sleep through the nervousness of worrying that we’ll miss our alarm makes for fitful rest, verging on a sense of no rest. But once again, we rise to the occasion and as is usual, we are ready to go well before we need to be. Great, because now we have enough time for a quick breakfast at the Hauptbahnhof before our train leaves for Berlin.

Waking so early and on a quiet train full of so many others dozing, it’s not long before Caroline joins them. It’ll be a short-lived nap as her neck groans under the evolving awkward position that the body wants to fall into.

It’s an hour before the sun begins to rise over the horizon and on a day forecast to have rain, it’s a wonderful moment of hope that the sun could follow us throughout the day. I’ll go with that optimistic expression rather than a resigned lament that it could rain. With a mere six days until the beginning of fall, we shouldn’t be too surprised that we might need to endure at least a day or two of poor weather, and in any case, we have already christened this journey north to the Baltic Sea our “Oregon in Germany Trip.”

Looking more and more like Oregon.

Great, now it’s my turn to be tempted by the seductive Dr. Sleep and his minions of Sandmen. I can fight this; all I need do is force myself into a productive activity like opening Lightroom and getting an early start on prepping today’s photos, but instead, my eyes are crossing, pushing things out of focus and triggering my eyelids to shut in order to relax eyes fatigued by the continuous fight to keep them open.

In less than an hour, we’ll be pulling into Berlin Hauptbahnhof, and while I’d love to jump out of the station and head over to Superbooth, an electronic music conference starting today, we have a connecting train we have to meet as our travels today are not yet finished.

Maybe we don’t arrive in Berlin with time to make our connection after various slowdowns, and now, with people and police on the track ahead, we’ve come to a complete stop. We’ve gone from 38 minutes of layover down to 13 minutes to find our track, which apparently is underground compared to where we pull in. And we’re moving again. Just as quickly as we get back underway, we are notified by email that our connection in Berlin is no longer possible and that we need to look for alternatives. Lucky us, another train is leaving at 10:42, and if we are able to maintain this schedule we are currently on, we’ll have 9 minutes to transfer otherwise, we’ll be hanging out until 12:30.

I’d like to say we made our train, but apparently, we died in some terrific accident at high speed on the ICE before ever reaching Berlin. I suggest this as though we never skipped a beat; we somehow folded time to arrive at the main station in Berlin in time to make our scheduled transfer with minutes to spare; this was already an impossibility. The train we board only features second class, and it’s loaded with old people; okay, I mean a lot of people far older than us. We race to find seats that are quickly disappearing as elbows are flying with the geriatric crowd intent on planting themselves. Aiming for two free seats, we nab them but only with some fierce determination, all the while avoiding knocking anyone out.

The first thing we can’t help but notice is the cackling group of four former cleaning ladies probably heading to the same East German resort talking about vaccines, politics, relative beauty of biddies in the upper 80s. I think they’re lying and are closer to being mistaken for being preserved in amber in some other age. But somehow, their voices are tuned to a frequency intended to cut into my frontal lobe, slice across the hemispheres, and stab my cerebellum. They go on and on without pause, without end; they are relentless. Others move away from them to the space between the trains, choosing to sit on the floor instead of listening to their obnoxious drone.

Then we recognize how hot it is in this car; the toilet light is almost always on, and I think I just saw Erick Honecker. What the fuck? All my blasphemic rhetoric and shit-talking have taken us from train wreck right to hell on the endless train of silver hairs going to the vacation of a lifetime on the Baltic Sea that we never arrive at. This will be our eternity of traveling second class to Stralsund. Hmmm, I wonder, do I get to write my own obituary from hell? Or am I doomed to write the same four paragraphs I’ve just written over and over until I’m mashing keys with bloody nubs, bone worn to the second knuckle?

Then, like a mirage that was never there, they disappear, and order is returned to those still alive yet still traveling to an island Brezhnev, and Tito might have taken a date at. By the way, did you know that Tito’s last name was Broz? Yeah, Brezhnev and Tito must have certainly been bros. Caroline might groan at this time that I’m heading into Rapider Niveauverlust, which kind of translates into a rapid loss of elegance or lowering the bar.

Pasewalk, Germany, is not the happening place other than we happen to be here. I’d never heard of this destination on the map before, but here we are, spending 20 minutes in a town with no discernable signs of life. And why are we chilling in Pasewalk today? There’s a train apparently moving faster than we are that needs to pass us else we might intersect on the track at some point, and that nonsense I wrote earlier about dying before reaching Berlin might come true before reaching Stralsund.

An inland waterway portends nearness to our ultimate destination, the Baltic Sea.

Here we are at the last stop of this leg of our journey today. Due to our train’s late arrival here in Stralsund, Germany, we have to catch a train that leaves in about 50 minutes. We’ll return on Saturday for our trip home, but our interest in this small town will have to be satisfied in the future.

With breakfast at 5:30 and with it now being a few minutes after 2:00, we are both hungry and thirsty. Outside the front doors of the Stralsund Bahnhof, we spot a döner shop that looks a lot better than the nearby McDonalds. Back across the street to the train station and our next ride is already on the track. We’ll need another 52 minutes before we arrive at our hotel on the Baltic Sea.

Crossing the bridge to Germany’s largest island called Rügen. Our hotel is right out at its eastern shore in a town called Binz. This certainly qualifies as Caroline and I visiting one of Germany’s most remote corners, having now traveled nine and a half hours to get here. As for the weather forecast, it calls for rain every day we’re here, but we hope that our combined happiness will help burn off some of that, and if not, we still are counting on the Oregon effect to carry us through.

People from the Pacific Northwest understand the vibe.

Here we are at Binz on Rügen for three days of cold, windy, wet weather or whatever else Mother Nature has in store for us unless it’s all three at once, and well, that’s just too much.

Our plan was to walk up the strand, but first, I needed a kiss standing over the Baltic as we’d never kissed standing over this sea. Caroline tried to tell me that we had, in fact, kissed at the Baltic Sea, but I corrected her, “Yes, we’ve kissed next to it but never ‘over’ it.”

Meanwhile, a man in a dry suit, as there’s no way that was a wet suit, was getting in some nice rides on these very regular swells that were inviting those sturdy enough to endure the cold seawater.

This is our last photo of the day, as shortly after this, the rain started coming down in buckets and even as I write this two and a half hours later, our pant legs are still wet. Back on the beach, next to the pier, we dipped into a small bar that featured hot coffee, which was precisely what we needed as exhaustion was writ large on our enthusiasm to do much more, especially in the rain.

It may only be Wednesday, but my intuition told me that before we walk to a popular restaurant, we should call ahead and see if they could seat us or offer a reservation. Caroline assured me this was totally unnecessary, but after six restaurants told us that they were booked through Saturday or Sunday, our options dwindled to such a degree that it started looking like fish was not going to be on the menu. Lucky/not-so-lucky, we walked up to a fancy restaurant specializing in fish, and in spite of their awkward means of ordering (without instructions for newcomers), we managed to enjoy a reasonable meal. Rügen turns out to be quite the popular destination, even on cold rainy days in the middle of the week shortly before fall; plan accordingly is my advice.