It’s a couple of degrees colder than the previous days, and it’s windy. Breakfast was once again at the same bakery as yesterday, Junge Die Bäckerei (Die in German is “The”). We had to eat there as they have the greatest Brötchen EVER in the form of a whole grain hazelnut roll; it’s just incredible and super satisfying, biting into whole pieces of hazelnuts under a slathering of butter and apricot jam.

With some time to spare after breakfast and returning to our hotel to settle the bill, this is a manual face-to-face process only available when the front desk is open from 8:00 until 7:30, and then we went for a walk over to the sea to look at the fury of the Baltic as it’s whipped by the wind.

Last night at the fish stand, we talked with a young guy who took our order and shared what it’s like to live in Binz: one word: boring. He said it’s expensive to live here and that you are lucky if you earn 10 cents an hour more than in other places. I suppose this is why so many of the staff we ran into clearing tables, cleaning rooms, and taking orders were Polish; it’s easier to make them shoulder the high cost of living while making more money than they can make in their own country that we’re so close to right now.

This came out as we asked about the quiet season, figuring the winter would be too harsh here to support much tourism. He responded that while that is mostly true, the town is booked this winter due to pent-up demand from people itching to get out during the pandemic. I have to admit to a curiosity about what this town is like as Arctic cold descends and the freezing sea chomps at the shore.

Good thing we had time to spare as while we walked up the street to the train station, I was saying that nothing looked the same. Shortly before arriving at the Kleinbahnhof (small train station), I insisted Caroline look for the Hauptbahnhof (main train station), and sure enough, this didn’t look familiar because we were going to the wrong station. We turn around and start eating that spare time we thought we had as we have 20 minutes of walking to get to the station where our train leaves in 30.

Once at the station, we have to deal with a schedule that doesn’t show us the train we need to Stralsund running for another hour. There is a train that’s running to Lietzow from which it looks like we can transfer and get to Stralsund, so we buy tickets for it and hope for the best. On the train to Lietzow, the guy checking our tickets informs us that this RE9 train auto-magically becomes the RE1609, so we just need to stay where we are. Why didn’t the automat show us this fact? And, of course, with this being a small town, there was no one working at an information booth.

Leaving Rügen about to reach Stralsund for a quick transfer to the RE3 train to Berlin.

Finally, on our way to Berlin. We chose to leave the island two hours early as the day we came in; our train was running late and stopped a few times to wait for other trains to transfer their passengers. We only had 8 minutes in Berlin to jump on a train to Erfurt, where we only had 6 minutes before another train left via Stuttgart that would bring us to Frankfurt.

We didn’t learn on our trip to Stralsund from Berlin that this train doesn’t have food or water on it, though the trip is over 3 hours long. While we have one more hazelnut Brötchen to split between us on our way to Germany’s capital city, we have nothing to drink. When we arrive, we’ll have a couple of hours until our next connection, with the plan being that we find a proper lunch. Knowing us, it’ll be a döner on the go, and why not? Berlin is known for its famous döners.

Spots of sun flash by too fast for me to properly photograph them. I want more sun and blue skies to close out this vacation in a vacation.

We’ve arrived in Berlin but not in time for the Superbooth synth conference that is ending today. So it goes; hopefully, next year, we’ll return for a normal non-COVID-influenced conference, and all the American vendors will be on hand, too. Now into the city for a moment for some speed sightseeing before grabbing that bite to eat.

There are police all over this area of the city as multiple demonstrations are going on, and from Caroline’s conversations with law enforcement, it appears they are in force in case protestors show up at one or the other protests where they might clash. Certain that we’re not walking into any confrontations, we head over to Brandenburg Gate, which Caroline hasn’t seen in person since before the Berlin Wall fell.

We didn’t have time to walk the extra 800 meters from the Sinti and Roma Memorial to the Jewish Memorial, and this memorial isn’t all that photogenic inside the walls so the sign has to stand in for our taking a moment to recognize all the “Gypsy’s” (not a nice word anymore) who were murdered by the Nazi fuckheads who loved killing everything out of the ordinary. Funny, I just realized that modern Germany, by frowning on diversity and enforcing conformity through browbeating, is, in effect, still fighting things out of the ordinary, only without the death part. Oh shit, Caroline just reminded me that every society or country is practicing this kind of cultural hegemony.

This is the German Parliament, which, in terms of functionality, is similar to America’s Capitol building and is called the Bundestag or Reichstag. While I took a photo of Caroline in front of it from multiple angles, none of them turned out well due to framing distance, fences, or other issues. With three other images of my beautiful wife gracing this page, we’ll have to leave it at that. When Caroline and I left Germany during the previous century, the seat of government was in boring Bonn. The symbolism of the new transparent dome casting sunlight onto the parliament floor is pretty cool in my book.

The Brandenburg Gate and the Berlin TV Tower might be two of the most iconic symbols of this city now that the old dividing wall is long gone.

This is the second location of demonstrations we’ve seen starting to form, but we’re keeping well clear of them as if something turns the wrong way, we could easily find ourselves in the middle of a melee that would have us missing our next train. There’s nothing going on in German politics at this time that really concerns us aside from the rise of the right side of the political spectrum, but who could blame Germans when people like Trump, Bolsanaro, Lil Nas X, Orban, Erdogan, Xi, and Putin wield so much influence?

There are many different paths in history, and for the past 76 years, Germany has been on the side of modernization, education, and, to a large extent, diversity. An older generation laments change, and an under-educated lower class listens to how good things used to be and needs someone to blame for their poor standing in society, but instead of shouldering blame due to their own ignorance and recalcitrance to change, they need to scapegoat the many foreigners taking the jobs they don’t want. It’s a similar situation everywhere on earth, such as in America, where our citizens don’t want to kill and process the meat on our table, prosperous Chinese people don’t want their children cleaning toilets, Croats won’t bus tables for crumbs when Bosniaks are at the door begging for jobs, and the list goes on.

Our choices of which paths to take in this age of stupefying change are not simple, nor is it correct in civil society to play people by instilling fear that they are getting screwed by unseen forces such as poor people stealing their futures. The sign above may as well have one pointing to Brexit, another for just sitting back watching Bolsanaro do what he pleases, and the other encouraging Trump to continue harping on the absurdity of stolen elections.

It seems like we are suffering a collective myopic moment in history where uncertainty is tossing us into the path of a speeding train. Maybe we think death is the better alternative as we run away from bogeymen that only exist in the fear machine.

The former German Democratic Republic was run by Walter Ulbricht from 1950 to 1971 when he was dethroned and succeeded by Erich Honecker, who fell with the Wall that divided the two Germany’s, East and West. What these two men had in common was that they let their country rot after World War II in the name of Communism, and instead of working to create a healthy socialist environment, they built police states that turned citizens against citizens while murdering those they felt too dangerous. What this neglect offered the West was the opportunity to tear down the crumbling remnants of a failed state. In its place, Germany is racing to offer an alternative that is rapidly evolving, as evidenced by the healthy display of resistance among the demonstrators who are freely voicing their concerns here in Berlin, where the government must witness the issues important to voters while similar actions happening across the country are relayed to media and politicians.

I would also like to note here that while I’ve poked fun at Honecker, who probably rightly deserves it, I also found that he led a quite interesting, brutal life before entering politics. I hope to carve out some time before our next visit to Berlin to learn more about the regime that ruled the east behind an Iron Curtain.

With the elections barely a week away, the push is underway to influence voters about issues the various interest groups who want to be heard are out here rallying for.

Our brief walk into Berlin is all too quickly over as Caroline and I make a note that we’ll have to return one day to give more study to this vast city.

I’ve taken too many photos here, and now I have to find something to write after saying almost everything I could hope to say about a mere hour on the streets of Berlin. Obviously, this glass cube seriously caught my attention.

It’s so interesting that I have three different views of it compared to only one for the Bundestag and one for Brandenburg Gate, but those places need more studied viewing and even a tour in regards to the Bundestag.

I think I could spend an entire day photographing the various open areas found throughout this train station. While filled with the same brands that populate every train station and airport in Germany, they do not detract so much that I can’t enjoy the beautiful architecture of this modern structure.

I had a hunch earlier before pulling into Berlin that we’d be eating a döner, and sure enough, I present you Döner mit Scharf. I’m hoping you don’t need me to translate “Scharf,” as you can see all the chili peppers on my popular Turkish sandwich.

Random towns go by, some with buildings that yank my attention, forcing the camera to the window as we glide by at over 100 mph. I can’t jot down where we are as my focus is on writing, and Google would be slow to respond anyway. No matter as someday, Caroline may very well have the opportunity to visit hundreds of these small towns if retirement goes our way.

Is this the return of blue skies?

Shooting sunsets through dirty train windows is a challenge, often producing tons of blooming as the light refracts through the glass in such a way that the image sees the trash can before ever finding its way into Lightroom for beautification treatment. Maybe I should point out my go-to settings for image adjustments as it’s usually not a lot. First, I lower the exposure a bit, increase the contrast, lower highlights, and increase shadows. I up the sharpness, hit things with the dehazer, remove some noise, adjust the lens distortion, straighten the horizon, and maybe perform some cropping. That’s really about it, as I don’t have a lot of time to invest in “fixing” images after prepping 20 to 50 images for a blog post and then moving on to writing between 1,000 and 3,000 words for it while still remaining active doing stuff that’s worth photographing and writing about, I simply cannot “Photoshop” my way to perfection.

Okay, so I said I had enough of this face on this post. Well, I never get enough of this face, or maybe it’s the eyes, or maybe it’s everything that comes along with Caroline.

It’s 7:20 in the early evening, and we are only about a half-hour from Frankfurt. We’ve been invited by the Engelhardt’s to join them for pumpkin curry that Klaus is cooking up, saving us a trip to a restaurant after 11 hours of traveling from the far north 500 miles away (804 kilometers) back to the center of Germany. If you’ve not gleaned it before, our trip to the sea was nothing shy of perfect, and that’s the last word.

This cannot possibly be our luck, can it? Here Caroline is in a Sanddorn shop selling all things Sanddorn, can you believe it? What is Sanddorn, you ask? It’s sea buckthorn, so that’s all cleared up, huh? Not if you are in America, as it’s definitely not a common item, not even on Amazon. Sure, you can find it as a supplement online, but this shop features it in no less than 25 food products and a bunch of other preparations, and from the number of people shopping at this store, it’s incredibly popular.

As important as it is to share information about sea buckthorn and its popularity in northern Germany, what I really want to tell you about is how lucky we are regarding how the weather is turning out. I now wish I’d screen-capped the forecast a couple of days ago when there was an 87% and 90% chance of rain, respectively, on Thursday and Friday. We were sitting in a local cafe enjoying a long breakfast as it was supposed to start raining at 11:00 this morning, but around 10:00, the forecast was updated, and so now we are out walking on the shore of the Baltic Sea, and we should be safe until about 3:00 this afternoon.

While the sky portends otherwise, here we are “mostly” dry, meaning Caroline has doffed her shoes as her modus operandi is in effect; no matter how cold the water she must dip her toes into the drink.

Strandkorbe or beach baskets (?) are all the rage at Germany’s beaches, especially on warm sunny days. This morning, with the threat of poor weather conditions, there was only this one guy, all alone, looking like he was asking himself, “What the hell am I doing here?” I might be wrong, but I think it might be Erich Honecker’s son, Steve.

We considered for a minute going out on this tall ship for sailing on the Baltic as for only €36 or $42, you get two hours under sail, but considering the lighting conditions and that we certainly didn’t want to find ourselves in some covered seating area looking out windows if the rain came up, we’ll have to save this one for a future visit.

This is proper beach attire for gentlemen in northern Germany. Notice the way he holds the umbrella; this is the correct angle; his form and gait portray his upbringing, while his hat protects him from damaging UV rays. Caroline believes he’s a secret police agent for the Stasi, but there’s no way I’m buying into that paranoia.

Whoever played this bad joke by placing a cairn at the water’s edge took Caroline deeper than she’d bargained for as she walked right into the sea.

I wonder what’s up the hill?

This neolithic sculpture has remained untouched here for over 4,000 years. It consists of white stones with provenance in southern Italy and is set on a granite boulder from Finland laid down during the last ice age.

I swear I’ve seen this particular cormorant in Oregon just this past November. Do they really migrate between cold and rainy climates?

We sat at a corner of the bay a good long while listening to a half dozen different types of shorebirds. Terns were hanging out with the ducks while the cormorants, swans, and seagulls were in the water, drying off or looking for food.

This early Mesolithic art has stood undisturbed for nearly 12,000 years, disproving the alleged history that says written language started with the Sumerians. If you look closely, you can still make out where twigs have been organized to spell out “Tree of Life,” which also proves English was the first spoken language on earth. Crazy, but you are seeing it with your very own eyes.

By the way, that nonsense about the Neolithic and Mesolithic art written above was added against my advice by that woman on the left of the photo. I only let her play these shenanigans because she’s cute.

The weather report has once again been updated in our favor with promises of nothing more than looming gray clouds blotting out the sun, but the rain has been pushed out until after 6:00 this evening.

So, from the Strand (beach) we take a steep trail from there into the Wald (forest).

To those who actually spend time reading these missives from the edges of Caroline’s and my experiences, I hope you enjoy the shorter blurbs where you need not scroll endlessly looking for the next photo.

You might remember, unless you too are old and forgetful, that just moments ago (or a few photos ago), we were way down there at sea level, and now we’re way up here nearly in the clouds. Our goal is to get way out there, depending on how difficult it is to hack our way through the jungle terrain.

For those who might be curious as to when and where I’m making all this stuff up, we are not in the day I’m writing about but already in the next day on a train to Berlin. I’m sharing this as I realize that by writing so little per photograph, I could run out of images to write to, and then I’d have nothing to do on this train but bug Caroline with more dumb comments in my crass abuse of German that should embarrass anyone in earshot that some American idiot is destroying their language to such vulgar effect. If only I knew how to write German, I could share an example; consider yourself saved, as you’d certainly have to sanitize your eyes mit Benzin.

Yesterday, we’d hoped to bike out to those chalk cliffs; well, that didn’t happen.

Being atop the cliffside we wanted to walk out to, my vertigo insists I’d be crazy to peer over the side that drops straight out of sight, tickling my dark hidden parts to such a degree that I would need to teleport to the bidet in our hotel room if I were to take a serious look. Without the ability to do just that, the immediate problem would then be that I’d have to clean “my fear” with my mask, thus foiling my ability to enter our hotel to change my soiled chonies, a conundrum I choose not to confront.

Like the dark side of the moon, this is the unseen bottom of the mushroom. I didn’t dare get closer as local legend has it that der böse Giftzwerg lives under the biggest Pilz im Wald (mushroom in the forest). After using this now for the third time in a blog entry, I think I should retire ever writing about “The Evil Poison Dwarf” (der böse Giftzwerg) again.

Hah, that would require self-control that my version of Tourette’s hardly knows. As a matter of fact, now that I’ve shared that I have some use of rudimentary German, I’m biting my nails, trying not to write the litany of ugliness I know. You can bet this has a thing or two to do with Caroline’s friend Claudia, who’d read this and find certainty in the knowledge that her friend’s husband is a Neanderthal, albeit one with great grammar, although she’d probably know that’s all my wife’s doing.

These leaf parasites are the spawn of the böse Giftzwerg that, after hatching, search out the biggest mushroom they can find, but don’t worry, we killed these with a fire we started using the flint Caroline found on the beach.

That’s Steve Honecker’s wife Leonida (transgender son/daughter of Leonid Brezhnev on the right) and their daughter Tiffany on the left. Ich hoffe, du hast Humor.

No trip to Europe would be complete without at least one visit to a yarn store; the closed shop in Frankfurt obviously didn’t count. At least I see a new pair of socks in my future to remind me of our perfect trip to Binz auf Rügen.

Because 14 kilometers wasn’t enough walking, we headed north on the Strandpromenade to check out some open-air market stalls selling various souvenirs to us tourists as no self-respecting local would buy the crap on offer. Instead of showing you those cheesy goods, I present you with “Path to Baltic Sea Through Forest.”

This is the Strandpromenade (Beach Walk) looking south as those yucky stalls were behind me where they belong. I wonder if I’ve done any good in sharing what the architecture of this seaside resort community looks like, but with gray skies, it’s been a struggle to capture things the way I would have liked to.

Dinner was a late lunch today, and before the shops closed (meaning the yarn store), we used the time for Caroline to explore some shopping options before dipping in for a Soft-Eis (soft-serve). Always on the hunt for hazelnut Soft-Eis, we read every menu we come across, looking for that wonderful memory we first experienced somewhere in the Austrian Alps some years ago.

Having dinner at 3:00 guaranteed I’d be hungry again, so we ventured back downstairs from our hotel room to this little fish joint called Happy-Happen for a late-night snack (actually, it’s only 7:30, but they close at 8:00) I grabbed the biggest fish sandwich I’ve ever seen. Expecting something akin to McDonald’s pitiful fish sandwich, I was handed the Tomahawk rib-eye version of Fischbrötchen, and my expectations of the lowly fish Mac will never be the same.

That rain that was supposed to arrive this evening never materialized, and with this beautiful night shot looking back at Binz from the pier, our two days of shoddy weather turned into perfect conditions for us to have an incredibly wonderful time out here on Germany’s largest island set next to the Baltic Sea.

Breakfast at the Rialto Hotel here in Binz am Rügen was an interesting experience as everyone other than the staff was well into their 70s and above. Of course, with me in my 50s (late 50s, as Caroline will remind me), I was the youngster and guffawed on the inside at the ancients sitting here in what was once the height of Nazi/East German/Communist middle-class luxury before realizing I was looking at Caroline and me in just 15 years. Then, considering the perspective of the young Polish staff waiting on us, I had to accept that to them, I was indistinguishable from those around me; old is old in the eyes of youth.

After being physically present at a place where “Schunkeln” was happening (best described as seated dancing featuring drunken swaying to folk music), going to Rüdesheim am Rhein, where the river cruise ships drop off grandparents for a walk down memory lane after drinking a bit too much wine, and now this, staying at resort village catering to elderly tourists celebrating the good old days…I must admit I’ve either lost my mind, or I’m certifiably old.

Damn it, what happened to the John Wise of yore jumping into the mosh pit at a Black Flag show in Los Angeles or standing nearly still, dipping my head in that cool disaffected German way to some avant-garde experimentalists in Frankfurt in the 1980s, adding hand movements when Techno became the thing in the 90s? I used to edge-lord myself to the normals by talking about forbidden subjects such as prostitution, drug cocktails, coprophilia, writing to mass murderers, going to sleep at 5:00 in the morning when most people were waking to go to work, and now I go to bed at 10:00, as in p.m., listen to National Public Radio, and talk about travel destinations. If I thought I was being cheeky, admitting I’m getting old, this litany of changes spells out in black and white that I’m indeed old, and there’s no joking about it.

How was it so easy to betray my ideals that I’d be a hooligan forever (albeit a pseudo-intellectual one) and find this level of conformity? Is this what comfort does to anger? Then again, there is that punk ethos here where I want to dismiss the oldies around me as being typical old people while I’m different, energetic, and quick to give their bland existence a two-finger salute. While the culturally marginal subjects that interested me are mostly dropped, I am still on the warpath about education, banality in entertainment, the environment, mediocrity, and lack of personal creativity. Finally, my travel isn’t just any old travel; we bike, hike, walk, and seek out experiences that enthrall us from daybreak to sundown, and the moon rise.

Now as my wife “uh-hums” me about getting stuck here at the keyboard, it’s time to go out and rent our e-bikes so we can tear ass past the shuffling oldsters, get cold and wet in the rain while liking it (okay, this is a lie as we don’t like the cold, wet part), and avoid eating in places again that makes us too aware of our near futures. If any fellow old people have tips for us to avoid the traps of appearing too old before we have to accept it, please share.

Pauli’s Radshop (bike rentals) was just down the street from us and was okay with us only taking the bikes for the day instead of the two days we reserved them for. Until last night, we were certain that we’d not be on a bike either of the days we’re out here on the island of Rügen, as the weather forecast was showing an 80+% chance of rain for both days. Yesterday, after we walked down the pier and learned what a driving downpour was like here on the Baltic Sea, we were making plans for a day of cafes and shopping, which would have been okay, too.

Overnight, the bad weather made space for Caroline and me by moving far enough away that we’ll hopefully have a full day of riding across the island. While the rain cleared out, the clouds remain with promises of blue skies and sunlight if we can trust the weatherman. So, with fingers crossed and only €40 Euros invested in both bikes compared with €38  per bike in Frankfurt, we are trying to maintain a path as close to the sea as we can.

Let me get this out of the way early on in this post: we’ll cover 50 kilometers today or 31 miles, which should have been ridden in about 2.5 hours, yet we were able to stretch them into 7.5 hours. Had we been more frugal with our stops to see as much as possible, we might have made it to Lohme on the north side of the island. Our original goal was to see a lot more of the Jasmund National Park than we ended up seeing.

From the dates that denote the life span of Otto Winzer, this could only be a monument to a former communist official, and sure enough, he was the Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1965 until his death in 1975. To get to this point along the trail, we detoured from the suggested route and rode through what looked like a checkpoint, which it was at a previous time.

Our first thought was that we were passing through former apartment blocks or luxury condos built during the former DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik), but we were wrong. We are at the Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude – KdF) resort built by the Nazis back in the late 1930s. However, it was never utilized as resources were reallocated south of here to Peenemünde, where Wernher von Braun was building the V2 rocket. Later, he came to the United States to build the Saturn 5 rocket that took Americans to the moon. Actually, I saw one of the old V2 rockets while I was stationed at Ft. Bliss in El Paso, Texas, back in 1987, and it was around that time I encountered John Hubbard, who published a book titled Birthdeath about the band Whitehouse through his label Strength Through Joy.

Of the resort, which was utilized by the East German army during the Cold War years, there are a number of buildings that have been renovated. Maybe they are summer dachas or year-round apartments, but at least one section is now a youth hostel. Then there are some older buildings that have collapsed and will never be rebuilt. Of the original 2.8 miles of resort buildings, only 1.9 miles still exist.

We’d just stopped to pick a blackberry, yes, a single blackberry, and were back on our bikes when I spotted this spider at nearly eye level between tree branches. It took some stretching and guesswork on focus, but I thought it turned out okay.

This area is well known for the abundance of flint, with Caroline informing me that “back in the day,” whenever those days were, flints as large as 100kg (220 pounds) used to be found out here, and ones with holes were especially desirable. Rocks with natural holes are called “chicken gods” and used to be hung in chicken coops in the hopes of ensuring a healthy flock. It turns out that we missed a very interesting large deposit of flints that were deposited by floods north of us between 3,500 and 4,000 years ago as the sea battered the island. There is something else “commonly” found here, but that is a couple of photos below.

While the jury is still out for Caroline if this was the greatest of choices of where to go on our mini-vacation in a vacation, I’m sold, and although there are detractors, especially considering where we chose to stay, the island itself is holding a lot of promise. Although we were moving relatively slowly on our bikes, I could see walking a solid 20 kilometers (12 miles) of the coast in order to cement the sounds and smells of the Baltic deeper into our memories.

Amber is the other “common” find along the shore, and though we were both skeptical of finding any, we didn’t look for much more than 30 seconds in the gravel next to the water’s edge before Caroline uncovered this small piece. Gem finding fever overtook Caroline, who dug furiously trying to find another, maybe larger, piece but gave up quickly so we could get back up the trail.

Ooh, hints of blue sky.

Sassnitz was the village where we found the perfect lunch place. Fischhus Bormann was the kind of local joint that begged us to stop in and feel just a wee bit uncomfortable. Why the discomfort? This is not a tourist stop; it is tiny and obviously preferred by the local residents who talk with an accent that, when Caroline and I speak, will put on display that we are from elsewhere. No matter, as we’ve been in this situation plenty of times over the course of our travels. One point is that we typically do not like popular tourist destinations, though that begs the question, “What the hell are we doing in Binz?”

Well, this was the payoff. Four types of fish for only €8.70 each ($10), and if you notice an odd number of pieces, we snarfed one even before silverware was delivered. Regarding the cost, this was the “local seniors” price, but the guy serving us charged us just that and for €20, including our bottle of mineral water. By the way, we passed on the complimentary two shots of schnapps but left well stuffed with our fill of fresh fish for only $23.

Just outside of town is the Jasmund National Park, which is the second German National Park we’ve visited together, the other being Wattenmeer.

We’ll only be able to see a small corner of the park as our bikes have to be returned to Pauli’s at 6:00 which is also the time the rain is forecast to return. It’s taken us four hours to get out this far, and we want to pedal further in and try to be back in Binz with time to spare, so we are now watching the clock.

E-bikes sure make easy work of hills though people should put the idea that these bikes have throttles and propulsion out of their heads. You still have to work to go forward, and sure enough, my thighs burn going up the steeper hills, but it’s a lot easier, and never do I have to get off the bike to push it uphill. On our way over, we got off the bikes and walked them across a couple of bridges where the bike paths were incredibly narrow, and any fall would have produced death by being run over by a car or falling 10 meters (30 feet) to the ground below.

We are in the cathedral of trees with the sun making a brief appearance.

This was about as far as we got before turning around. As you can see from the sign, we are 3.2 kilometers from Sassnitz (2 miles) and are not done stopping for photos, so this was as good a place as any. Caroline wanted to ride out to the Hügelgräber Promoisel (graves), but that extra half-hour might cost us getting the bikes back by the time our shop closes.

Then I agreed that we’d ride to Rusewase, only 0,7 kilometers away (about half a mile), but we didn’t get far before the trail turned so muddy that we thought better of it and went back. For the minor extra effort, we were treated with this pond.

And because we won’t be able to help ourselves from stopping along the way to photograph stuff such as these mushrooms, our erring on being conservative is more of us practicing that adulting thing.

Fly like the wind, Caroline! You are free to lead us across your fatherland, or maybe during this time, we should refer to it as your gender-neutral parentland.

We are taking a slightly different path back, at least part of the way. While there were a few uncomfortable sections of open road we had to contend with today, about 90% of our ride was on dedicated bike lanes, often far away from the roads.

Off in the distance is a lighthouse, but not one of the old romantic ones, so instead, I present you with two rocks side to side with the trail in the middle. Does anyone care to guess what this looks like to me?

This is not Caroline bushwhacking a trail. We were going to the seashore to find a better view of the lighthouse, but this photo turned out better than it, so I am presenting to you My Wife With e-Bike in the Grasses.

Making good time back to town, we decide to make a detour.

This is the Kleiner Jasmunder Bodden a.k.a. the Small Jasmund Lake. Just five minutes before the sun was still out, offering hope for a sunlit lake with Blauer Himmel overhead (blue skies), the German sounds much more poetic to my ears.

About to leave the lake for our ride back in earnest this time, Caroline asked me to wait as she smiled at what she called “Electrified hair” and proceeded to twist some errant hair into something she found funny. My wife is rude and is damn good at hiding it from others as everyone else thinks she’s sweet, but when it’s just her and I, you can’t put it past her to laugh at my expense.

At this rate, will we ever get back to Binz? I was just riding along when Caroline stopped to take a photo of the vines crawling up the trees with her crummy camera phone when I interjected (not rudely, I swear) that I would take a real photo for her (I wasn’t condescending) and so I offer her this image I title in her honor “Vines on Tree” (because I love her) regardless if anyone else thinks this is a weird way to express love.

We made it in time to Pauli’s bike shop and are now back out on foot, trying to capture all the great weather Binz on Rügen has to offer.

That’s a tall sailing ship at dock out there at the end of the pier, and for a mere €36 each, we could join the crew for a two-hour trip around the area, but the weather reports have been pretty accurate, at least for about 8 hours ahead, and it’s calling for rain during that time. With clouds moving in and darkness around the time the ship returns, the photographic value of the trip seems negligible, so we’ll save it for a return visit, should there ever be one.

With that, we walked back into the center of the village and grabbed dinner before going to our room and passing out at 9:00 because, obviously, we are getting old.

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.