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.