Mission log

Mission log, day 38

Life on this planet seems to be dominated by two species, with both exhibiting a startling diversity in body shape, body size, skin coloration, and hair color/length/texture/coverage. One of the two species is bipedal, and tends to wear clothing, especially when outside the home. The style, color, material, and amount of this clothing is widely variable, though I have been unable to discern a pattern, as individual members of the species often show a great difference in opinion on what clothing is appropriate for a location, situation, or even current weather.

The second primary species is quadrupedal, and generally relies on a dense coat of hair covering its entire body for protection from the elements, and for whatever social paradigms which demand that the bipeds wear clothing.  A select few of the quadrupeds have been observed wearing simple garments, but these individuals seem generally displeased, and I have concluded that they are experiencing some sort of public shaming ritual as a punishment. Nearly all of the quadrupeds wear a single ornament around the throat; the material, color, and decoration of this item shows nearly as much variation as that of the bipeds’ clothing, and displays a small collection of bright metal chips.  Current assumption is that this throat band is a distinction of rank; further study is required to determine whether it signifies rank among the quadrupeds, or to show superiority of all quadrupeds over that of the bipeds.  When quadrupeds are seen in public with bipeds, they are almost always joined by a strap leading from this throat band to the biped’s hand, probably to indicate some form of pair-bonding.

It is by observing these pairings in public that I have discovered a most astonishing behavior linking the two species, in a symbiosis which is unique in my experience.  The quadrupeds generate small deposits of organic material once or twice a day.  The bipeds, in turn, collect these deposits in polymer pouches.  This behavior leads me to believe that the organic material must be highly valued, because it is collected as soon as the quadrupeds create them, and the pouches are usually sealed immediately, perhaps to preserve freshness.  On several occasions, I have followed the biped/quadruped pairings over several degrees of their sun’s course through the sky, and observed that after collection, these pouches are carried for the remainder of their foray, sometimes suspended from the strap which marks the pair-bonding.  Sometimes, the pouches are deposited in collection devices supplied by the Municipal Authority.  I believe that this a form of taxation, levied to defray costs of several stations I’ve seen to dispense the polymer pouches for deposit collection.

Clearly, the value of these deposits must be great, but I have failed in my attempts to capitalize on this knowledge.  In rare cases, I have seen bipeds ignoring the leavings of their quadrupedal companions.  These must be individuals of great wealth and power, who have no need for the bounty of their pair-bonded quadrupeds.  In such cases, I have taken it upon myself to collect the deposits myself, hoping to trade them for local currency.  Every seven days, a gathering of vendors congregates in the heart of the community to sell fruiting bodies and edible roots of several plant species, muscle tissue from less valuable quadrupeds and bipeds, ovum with crunchy shells, and baked comestibles.  I believed this would be an excellent opportunity to both experience the trade system of these people, and learn more of the value of quadruped deposits.  I secured a table and piled it high with a collection I had made over the past week, but was unable to make a single sale.  In fact, I observed most of the bipeds contorting their facial features and moving away from my wares, although in a curious twist, the quadrupeds showed some interest.  Perhaps the samples I had collected had lost their vital freshness.

There is another possible explanation for my commercial failure.  The color, consistency, texture, odor, and size of the deposits is nearly as diverse as that of the quadrupeds who leave them.  I confess that I only tested the flavor of one sample, and was so displeased that I have made no further comparisons of that sensory experience.  Perhaps the samples I had collected for sale did not display enough variety, as did the plant and animal matter of other vendors, or maybe additional processing is required before the product is commercially viable.

Almost There

Today is my anniversary. A year ago today (around lunchtime), I reached the summit of Mount Katahdin and officially finished my Appalachian Trail thru-hike.  Of course, I still needed to hike back down, but what's five or six more miles?

A couple weeks ago, I posted a chapter from the manuscript I wrote about my hike. I'm still waiting to hear back from a few of the agents I queried, but so far there have been no takers. Keep your fingers crossed! Maybe to mark this occasion, I'll post another chapter today. This is the very first chapter of the book. I hope you like it, but I really hope it will show up in your bookstore someday soon.

Almost There

Later, a friend of mine would refer to her as “the crazy lady.”  That’s no way to narrow down the vast field of characters you meet on the Appalachian Trail, except in terms of gender.  It’s also pretty judgmental, coming from a guy who got so dehydrated and hungry that he hallucinated unicorns shortly before meeting her.

I didn’t think that she was genuinely crazy.  Not any more than any other person who grabs a pack and decides to spend a few months hiking between Georgia and Maine.  Like the cat said, “We’re all mad here.”  The specific flavors of crazy vary a bit, but I’d like to be very clear on one point before we delve too deeply into my 2014 Appalachian Trail thru-hike: I never met anyone who I thought posed any genuine danger to me or others.  There were one or two people I didn’t really like, but it was mostly a vague feeling of disinterest.  I just didn’t want to hang out with them.  I never met anyone that I thought was going to pull a knife while I was sleeping and start poking it into people.

This woman was, if anything, overly optimistic, and maybe a little naïve about the scope of what lay before her.  To be fair, that’s how everyone starts a thru-hike.  My little party was four northbound (or NOBO) thru-hikers.  We had met each other individually earlier along the trail, and had serendipitously come together as a group at Winturri Shelter, just north of Rutland, Vermont.  She was hiking alone.  I met her a little before noon on June 29.  I had spent the morning climbing South Horn and Bigelow Mountain, with a ten-minute break on Avery Peak, and was heading down the other side when I met her on her way up.  I’d already seen my highest elevation for the day, but mosquitoes whining incessantly in my ears the night before had kept me from getting any sleep, so I was exhausted, and I confess that although I smiled and listened attentively when she spoke with me, a persistent part of my brain was annoyed that I couldn’t return to the day’s work of getting to West Carry Pond until the conversation ended.  I wasn’t proud of that part of me, so I shoved it in a corner and ignored it as best I could.

“Good morning,” I had opened.

“Hi!” She beamed at me, overflowing with the giddy optimism I remembered from my first weeks on the trail.  Hell, I could remember having it as recently as ten days earlier, but somewhere in between I’d crossed an invisible line, and was now powered by sheer force of will to see this thing finished.  She was southbound, or SOBO, so she had only been on the trail for a couple of weeks.  I was on track to finish in less than ten days.  “What’s your name?”

I stood to one side of the trail, which in that section was a long, sloped sheet of granite canted slightly to one side.  It had been like that most of the way down from the summit, with intermittent stands of small, scrubby trees. Smiling through my exhaustion, I told her, “Treefrog.”  For the first few days on the trail, your brain stumbles on that question, unsure whether to respond with your given name or your “trail name,” which is a bit like a CB handle for hikers.  It becomes your identity so quickly that I started correcting other hikers who would answer “James” or “Ellen” by reminding them that they were “Beans” or “Hoof It.”  In Tennessee, I tried to order a pizza as “Treefrog” and the 50ish woman at the counter drawled, “Are you serious?” with such nasal disbelief that my brother Chris, who was visiting me at the time, barely made it outside before doubling over with laughter.

She gazed past me, up the slope that would lead her to views of Flagstaff Lake and the peak named for Myron Avery, the man who did most of the hard work of making the Appalachian Trail a reality after Benton MacKaye came up with the idea.  MacKaye is more well known, but Avery actually got things done.  It was head in the clouds versus feet on the ground, traits which are both experienced in a very literal sense by the people enjoying the combined efforts of the two men.  “Almost there,” she breathed, with what I took to be an almost reverential awe.

Nodding, I looked back over my shoulder.  “Yeah, not much further, you’ll be at the top.”  I’d been on both sides of similar conversations for almost four months, but most conversations between people who have just met on the trail become routine after a little while.  Same questions, different answers.  What’s your name?  When did you start (an easy, unobtrusive way to determine which of you is faster)?  Where are you heading tonight?  If you see them again, or if the conversation lasts a while, you get into more detail.  Where are you from?  What do you do in The World?  What brings you to the trail?  Talk to the same person long enough, and you will, in dribs and drabs, get their life story.

She shook her head and looked at me like I’d missed the joke.  “No, that’s me.  Almost There.”

We talked a few minutes more, while she radiated good vibes and optimism and I waved half-heartedly at the few mosquitoes who had ventured above the treeline to bring me the itchy welts they saw as gifts that keep on giving.  Almost There had sold everything before starting her hike.  “Got rid of it all,” she said, nodding proudly.  With both hands, she pinched at a roll of stomach below her hip belt.  “Gonna get rid of this, too!”

I was warming to her.  I couldn’t help it.  I knew I’d make it to West Carry Pond in plenty of time.  My real concern was making it from there to the ferry across the Kennebec River the next day—really just a man with a canoe, but his canoe was the official route across the Kennebec, and if we didn’t make it across by the time he stopped service for the day at 11 AM, we’d have to backtrack 3.6 miles to the nearest campsite and wait for the next day.  Our little party was locked in to our schedule.  We had to finish on the 8^th, because that’s when my family would be there to give us a ride out of the park.  Two of the others had already purchased plane tickets for the 9^th—we couldn’t afford to lose a day.  Almost There had no such concerns.  She was past the Kennebec, and from here to Georgia all she had to do was keep walking, at whatever speed pleased her most.  In her mind, she wasn’t just beginning the hike, but the rest of her life.

“I haven’t decided yet what to do next.  I’ve lived in Maine all my life, but I think it’s time for a change. It’ll be hard saying goodbye, but maybe I’ll just keep going when I get to the end, you know?”

No, I didn’t know.  I knew that I wanted to sleep for about three days straight.  I knew that I felt capable of eating an entire salad bar myself, and chasing it with a pan of lasagna, and maybe some waffles and sausage, and a glass of milk.  I knew that if I saw another “Scenic Viewpoint” sign, I would react exactly as I had for the past week: with a middle finger and a dirty look, never breaking stride.  My body was depleted of all energy reserves.  The night before, I had used a borrowed cell phone to call my girlfriend and told her, nearly in tears, to cancel all hiking plans she had for us in Maine after I finished Katahdin.

But I remembered being where Almost There was.  Not physically, but spiritually.  I remembered practically glowing with excitement, even three months into the trip, knowing that I was finally doing something I’d wanted to do since I was eleven.  It made me happy to see her still so full of high spirits, still looking forward to an adventure I had almost completed.

“I’ve got my passport with me—I could just keep traveling!”  Maybe she would.  She wouldn’t even have to finish the trail.  Many people started a thru-hike and later decide it wasn’t what they expected.  Most of those just go home, but some maintain their momentum and go on to do something else.  In North Carolina, I’d met a man whose wife had to leave the trail when she dislocated her toe, but they were looking into a long-distance canoe trip to replace their thru-hike aspirations.  I suspect that there are an awful lot of people who set out on the trail hoping to find a new direction.  Almost There was the fourth person I’d met who’d sold everything, including their homes, before starting the journey, and their first post-hike task would be to find a new place to live.  I had met a 27-year U.S. Army veteran who set out on the trail to heal her soul, two men who had struggled with drug addiction and who viewed hiking as a form of rehab, and two people who hiked to recover from the death of a spouse.  To some degree, I think many people expect to experience some sort of revelatory change along the trail.  It was one of the questions I often fielded from people who knew a little about the trail, but had never completed a Long Hike themselves: How has it changed you?

I usually laughed it off, telling them that it had made me hairier, hungrier, and tired, because the truth of it is that those were the only changes in me I could discern.  Otherwise, I didn’t feel Changed so much as… Honed.  I had spent most of my life becoming someone who knew they could hike the Appalachian Trail, who had the physical ability and the mental discipline to succeed at such an endeavor, and although I spent 121 days proving that, I didn’t feel like I’d become a new person.  Still, I remembered having the bubbling cheeriness of Almost There, the bright hope for the trail ahead of me.  And, yes, the hope that it would change me somehow.  Most of my time after college had been spent in generally futile efforts to find gainful employment in my field, and although I’d had a few jobs, I’d spent almost as much time out of work, looking for a company that wanted me.  It wore me down, and eroded the confidence I’d taken so long to build.  I was generally a happy person, but I wasn’t really happy with where I was.  In time, that felt more like I wasn’t happy with who I was.  There was something very attractive about the idea of walking into the woods to disappear, and to be replaced, weeks or months later, by someone better.

Auf wiedersehen

This will be the final Germany post until I go back and write something more detailed for a couple high points, like the time I flew a plane (pun intended), or meeting the apiary colonists.  The day we left Berlin was mostly a lot of time in the car. I'd already decided to try fighting a vicious European head cold by then, so I was relatively content to sit in the back, stare out the window, and try to remember what it felt like to breathe.

The Bridge of Spies

Our drive took us to Potsdam, with a stop at the edge of town to see the Bridge of Spies. I was excited about that, because I'd heard of it already, but I honestly didn't have any idea how it had gotten that nickname. The only sign explaining why it was the Bridge of Spies was in German, so I didn't find out until I got home and had Wikipedia access that it was used during the Cold War to exchange captured spies and political prisoners because it served as a physical link between East Germany and West Berlin.

One of the statues on the Bridge of Spies: a swimming centaur strangling a fish.

We had no particular plan (that I knew) for Potsdam, but it's a nice town for wandering. We looked in a few small shops, and walked down streets full of pedestrians and cafe furniture, with little to no room for auto traffic. I liked those streets.

Residential Potsdam.

A long row of these tiles were the only indication of the route of a bike path across a wide plaza.

I later learned that there was a plan for Potsdam, but it had been plotted in German, working on the assumption that I would, as always, go with the flow. They were right.

At some point, the King of Prussia (not the town in Pennsylvania) built a palace here. I was led to believe that it was his summer home. Not a bad place to hang out with some lemonade.

You can tell it's a grand palace because my camera lens didn't have a wide enough angle to photograph all of it.

Now the palace grounds are a public park, and you can get tours of the buildings for a small fee. We still had to get to Frankfurt, so we were content to walk through the grounds looking at fountains, gardens, statuary, and immaculately groomed paths. It's good to be king.

Google Awesomed this photo. I'm ok with that.

I think this statue shows how to harvest Sea Babies. Honestly, I was just impressed at how much negative space is in that net. 

The rest of the day was Car Time. We checked in to a tiny hotel which turned out to be literally (correct usage) around the corner from Ginko's building. We met him again that night for dinner, and he got up early to join us for breakfast as well (at a cafe which was on said corner. We planned well for Frankfurt).

In Germany, it's legal to walk down the street drinking a beer. We tried it. It felt strange.

No mints on the pillows here. Germany is weird.

68

One year ago today, I crossed the border into Maine, the state where Mom was born, on her 67th birthday. I was about two weeks from the end of my thru-hike, and I started the day in high spirits, even though the four friends who'd been hiking with me since Vermont had decided the previous evening to part ways with me for a few days.

This year, I'm working on getting my manuscript published.  I've written a book about hiking the Appalachian Trail, what led me to the trail in the first place, and why I took Mom's ashes with me.  Agents have been queried; now it's a matter of waiting for a favorable response, and constantly agonizing over whether my work is good enough to impress anyone.

Let's find out. Below is an excerpt from the manuscript, a single chapter from late in the trail. There are a couple references to earlier chapters, but I think it still stands alone well enough to be readable.  Why this chapter, instead of one more inspiring, uplifting, or funny? Because this chapter covers that day, one year ago, when I brought Mom home.  Happy Birthday, Mom.

Alone Again

          My friends left me.  The hike from Pinkham Notch had been harder on them than I’d realized, and during the night at Imp Shelter, they decided to stop at a hostel the next day.  I passed the hostel before noon, and was certain that they wouldn’t catch up with me by the time I reached Rangeley, our next planned resupply town.  They had tried to convince me to join them, plying me with the promise of beds, showers, laundry, and good food, but they lost me when they revealed their plan to slackpack for a day or so to conserve energy.  Slackpacking is when you hike with only a daypack, and a shuttle either drops you off at the start, or picks you up for the return, and you generally spend both nights at the same place.  Many hostels along the AT offer this service for free, even supplying the daypacks, because it encourages hikers to stay a second night and spend more money.  My decision wasn’t motivated by thrift, but conviction.  That wasn’t how I wanted to hike the trail.  I had never slackpacked, yellow blazed, or taken shortcuts, and I wasn’t going to start less than three hundred miles from the end.  It wasn’t my idea of thru-hiking.  I saw the hostel, gave the signs advertising baked goods and cold drinks no more than a passing thought after three meals from Simon and Irene, and kept hiking.  My friends had slept in, knowing they didn’t have far to go that day.  Doyi’s toes were in bad shape, and Ginko was getting crabby and short-tempered.  We all needed a rest, but I didn’t allow myself a break.  It required some rough climbing and difficult terrain, but that night I was rewarded with white lady’s slippers on the side trail to the Gentian Pond Shelter, which was oriented to provide a stunning view of the sunset over the valley below, and a few steps from the shelter I could hear where the pond drained into a waterfall that worked its way down to the valley.

          I left at five the next morning, June 23, my 106^th day on the trail, and what would have been my mom’s sixty-seventh birthday.  That was the day I entered Maine, the state where she’d been born, and where we would finish our 2,185.3 mile hike together, a dream we’d both had for decades, but only I would see completed.  The weather was beautiful, and I was filled with hope for the day, my eyes damp with all the importance I had heaped upon it.  As soon as I realized, days earlier, that I would cross the border on her birthday, I felt it would be auspicious.

          It was miserable.

          I’d had Gentian Pond and the shelter to myself for hours, and fell asleep by seven, excited at the prospect of nine and a half solid hours of sleep, but two section hikers I’d met and forgotten arrived at eight, making lots of noise, and tried to maintain a conversation that didn’t interest me.  I didn’t get to sleep again until well after nine.  My energy level was low throughout Mom’s birthday, and the trail was very rough.  In the south, I’d estimated my arrival times based upon a walking speed of three miles an hour, and I often arrived earlier than I’d expected.  In Maine, I would estimate arrivals based upon a speed of two miles an hour, and I was later than I’d hoped every single day.  Maine was brutal, and I was never sure whether it was because it was brutal all on its own, or because I got there after hiking almost two thousand miles in under four months.  The hiking machine was rapidly losing steam.

          The day I entered Maine, it took me almost twelve hours to go a little under fifteen miles.  One of those miles was Mahoosuc Notch, a section of trail described by my guidebook as the “most difficult or fun mile of the AT,” a jumbled maze of boulders I’d actually been looking forward to navigating, thinking that as a rock climber, I’d have a distinct advantage.  Before we stopped at Imp Shelter, we had planned on hiking through Mahoosuc early in the morning, when we were fresh, and helping each other through as a group.  I arrived at Mahoosuc in the afternoon, already tired, accompanied accidentally by Pack and Big Hungry.  Pack had a barely-noticeable lisp, and had already hiked the Pacific Crest Trail.  Big Hungry was a fourteen pound rat terrier he’d adopted from a shelter just before starting the AT.  She was so small that she didn’t carry a pack, as many trail dogs do, but spry enough that she had less trouble navigating Mahoosuc than Pack and I.  In one spot, she darted out of the way just as Pack fell on his way over a sedan-sized boulder and landed on his backpack where Big Hungry had been just a moment earlier.  I proudly congratulated myself internally, knowing that my skill and experience as a rock climber would easily get me over the obstacle, and moments later fell at exactly the same place after my foot slipped off exactly the same edge that had failed him.  I dropped six feet with windmill arms and wheelbarrow-handle legs before landing so hard on my right ass cheek that I was certain I’d be limping for the rest of the trip.  It took a minute or two before I could even stand up straight, and I was later surprised to see that I wasn’t purple halfway down my thigh.  I’ve never bruised easily off-trail, and I’d always assumed that it was thanks to a high-protein diet, but the jar of peanut butter I ate every four or five days didn’t seem enough to protect me after that fall.

          It took over an hour to get through Mahoosuc Notch, and the physical difficulty in passing it was only one factor; it’s not a well-blazed section, and Pack and I often had different ideas about where the trail went.  Sometimes neither of us knew, and it wasn’t until one of us found a new blaze and yelled to the other that we both got back on track.  I tore a new hole in one of my shoes, and then painfully drove the exposed toe onto the jagged edge of a chunk of granite on the north end of the notch, after I’d thought the worst was over.  By then, any excitement I’d had about Mahoosuc Notch had evaporated with my high hopes for Mom’s birthday, and the last shreds of my good mood from my final day in New Hampshire.

          Two hours later, I arrived at Speck Pond Shelter and creaked slowly to the floor.  I changed shoes and busied myself sweeping the shelter and arranging my bunk, then took what I needed to stock up on water from the spring, but returned with only enough to get me through the evening.  The blackflies in the area were fierce, and I only found relief from them by wearing my entire rain shell, because they easily bit through everything else I had.  I put on my other pair of socks, because the camp shoes Liz had mailed to me in Delaware Water Gap were made of a mesh material that provided easy access to my feet, and I constantly brushed my hands against each other and my face to keep the blood-sucking bastards off of my flesh.  One of them snuck in under my watch band and bit me on the wrist.  When blackflies bite you, you almost never feel it.  Blackflies carry an anticoagulant in their saliva; the first indication of a bite is pinprick marks on your flesh that bleed like open wounds.  Later, those pinpricks itch like crazy.  I realized I’d been bitten under my watch because when my sleeve pulled back, I saw a bright smear of blood on the cuff of my yellow rain jacket.  I spent most of my evening swearing and miserable, on the brink of tears.  Happy birthday, Mom.

          I stayed at Hall Mountain the next night, and felt a bit better because I’d eaten a filling dinner at Speck Pond, did a better job of hydrating, and to my boundless delight, Hall Mountain wasn’t clotted with fucking blackflies.  I still had one problem: because we’d stopped at Imp instead of Rattling River three nights earlier, I was no longer sure I had enough food to get me to Rangeley.  I’d planned on cooking a large dinner for my friends to celebrate entering our very last state, but we parted ways before that happened, so I knew I had enough dinners—I just didn’t have enough hiking food for the days between the dinners.  I was working out that math early in the afternoon when I stepped out onto B Hill Road, and as I looked for traffic, a van pulled up and stopped beside me.  Even before the gravel stopped crunching, Doyi leaned out of the passenger window, and a moment later the sliding door opened to reveal Socs, Ginko, and Catch Me.  They had gone from one hostel to another, and invited me to join them, but I was still adamant about not slackpacking.  Then they asked if there was anything else I needed, explaining that they were on their way into town for a resupply when they chanced upon me popping out of the woods.  “Actually, yeah—could you spare a couple granola bars, or a Snickers?  I have almost enough food to get to Rangeley, but I’d feel a lot better with two or three more snacks.”

          Doyi couldn’t reach his pack, but Ginko, Socs, and Catch Me immediately started handing me food, and I soon had more than I’d need—in fact, I had enough that I had two extra snacks that day as I finished my hike, and I would be hard pressed to decide whether the extra food or seeing my friends did more to boost my morale that afternoon.  Whichever it was, when I reached Hall Mountain Shelter at the end of my 107^th day on the trail, I was in such a good mood that I left my pack in the shelter and practically jogged up the mountainside behind it to an overlook—several days after I’d started giving the finger to “viewpoint” signs along the trail.  Socs had taken over my planning duties for the rest of the group, and she assured me that I’d see them again in Rangeley in two days.

Berlin

Last week was a break from Germania because I was out of town for a few days, and I didn't get a chance to write more about our recent trip to Europe.  I've been busy with a couple other things, one of which may become a Pretty Big Deal soon. Are you excited? I know I am!

Meantime, want to see some pictures of Berlin? We spent a few days there, seeing what we could manage in the time we had. The Girl's cousin (second cousin, whatever) served as a tour guide and a translator for those of us who can't get by in German (me).  As luck would have it, he's a bit of an expert on the division and later reunification of Germany, and the Berlin Wall.  I joked that we could take him blindfolded anywhere in the city, remove the blindfold, and he'd know whether we were in East or West Berlin, and how far we were from the wall, but I really think he could have done it.

Berlin's official past time seems to be graffiti. Almost every building is covered up to about eight feet. This wall is set up specifically for graffiti; anyone can come and paint it whenever they like.

We saw a LOT in Berlin. On one afternoon, we took a bike tour of sites with a historical connection to the wall and reunification.  We visited an art museum, an Allied History museum, and a German history museum.  It was all fascinating, but it was also pretty heavy. I never realized how much empathy I had until I tried to digest a steady stream of Berlin history for four days straight. As I told our guide/second cousin, "It's no wonder you people drink."

Tiny wooden people helping each other in an alley.

A sculpture outside the Allied History Museum celebrating the liberation of Berlin.

There are still a lot of reminders of World War Two and the division of Germany. Older buildings (and a few monuments) still bear bullet holes and scars from heavier artillery. We saw at least two prominent churches which had suffered heavy bombing, but the damaged remains are still standing today--and mysteriously free of graffiti, as though there are some lines nobody will cross.

After the Nazis were defeated and Russia occupied East Germany, they built a monument to the Russian forces in Berlin. When they left during reunification, part of the agreement was that Berlin had to preserve and protect that monument. It's surrounded by an eight foot chainlink fence, and a gate that closes each night. It doesn't get many visitors.

The view from the top of one of Berlin's tallest buildings.

The Brandenburg Gate.  The tiny vertical line in the distance is the Victory Column.

One afternoon, we had a tour of the Bundestag (or the Reichstag, depending on your generation). This is like touring the Capitol Building in DC; it's their seat of government. It's been bombed, burned, and rebuilt. You can see the styles of three different architects, but the most prominent feature is the enormous glass dome on top. It has a separate access from the rest of the building, so you can see it just by getting in line and going through a security checkpoint. We went up there before taking a tour of the rest of the building.

The mirrored funnel shape reflects heat and light through a large window in the floor to the legislative assembly chamber below. The sides of the dome are glass, but the very top is open to the elements. It's an amazing structure.

The Bundestag.

The Jewish Memorial. The ground level drops as you cross, so the columns eventually block your view. It's meant to show how families were separated, and didn't know where their lost people had gone. It's very effective, and a little creepy.  The building in the background is the American Embassy.

A set of wings outside the Mexican Embassy, perfectly designed for photos.

Scweinshaxe, the manliest meal I've ever had. It broke my knife.

Azaleas!

The last time she took me to the National Arboretum, I had just arrived on a red-eye flight from Oregon.  The next day, after I'd had some sleep and became human, she laughed at how she liked me better when I hadn't had any sleep, because I was "easier to control."

I should have sensed danger, I know.

This time, I was in much better shape.  I was a little tired, sure, but at least I'd had SOME sleep the previous night, the azaleas were in bloom, the weather was perfect, and we got a chance to see the bonsai exhibit.

Do you have any idea how many azalea varieties there are?  Me, either, but judging by what's on display at the arboretum, it's in the neighborhood of "are you kidding me??"  Suffice to say, I don't know the names of anything pictures here; even non-azalea species I can only paint with a wide brush like "lily."

This tree was in the herb garden by a sign reminding you to not pick the fruit.  This particular fruit is used to flavor drinks.

This trellis was full of carpenter bees.  The Girl refused to walk through it.  When I went through, I could hear the buzzing drone surrounding me.  Not to worry: carpenter bees have no stinger.

On an otherwise bare hillside stand 22 sandstone columns which used to be part of the Capitol building.  Each of the Corinthian tops took a skilled carver 6 months to form.

The Bonsai exhibit might have been my favorite part.  It made me want a tiny tree.  The variety of species and forms on display was extensive, and I got to see a lot of stuff I'd never known about bonsai.  For instance, there are sometimes more than one tree, and the artist has trained not a single plant, but a tiny forest.

"...with a path running down the middle."

This project was very detailed.  The gravel path wound between larger rocks, with trees looming above.  Looking very close, it seemed like any number of places I've hiked...

...But the whole thing would fit in a large serving dish.

Looking upward under one of the tropical varieties.  Limbspan was about three feet.

There were a few flowering bonsai (azaleas, coincidentally).  Quite striking, and entirely unexpected.

After the bonsai exhibit, we wandered through the Northern Forest area, with trees and plants more familiar to me.  And a frog pond.

The locals were very patient.

I like the structural detail when you look really, really close at blooms (Iris. No idea what variety.)

Even closer on another iris.

Sparrenburg Castle

Sometime in the thirteenth century, Sparrenburg Castle was built to watch over the trade route through Bielefeld. It also held the mighty coffers; safe passage required a toll, and all that money had to be kept somewhere.

It's not pertinent to the tour, but I liked these plants.

Foundations of the old armory buildings. Tunnels connected the armory (and adjacent barracks) to the two nearest towers.

Naturally, it became a bit of a target.  It was attacked and besieged numerous times in its past, but it was never, in all of those engagements, captured.

Part of the wall of one of the corner towers. A tree has spread its roots across the wall; that small alcove is full of votive candles, like a tiny shrine.

A model of the castle's original structures.

I got most of my information about Sparrenburg from The Girl's cousin, who doubled as our able tour guide for the final few days of our German trip.  He got the information from the official tour guide at the castle, who conducted the tour in rapid, detailed German.  My translator did his level best to keep up, but there was a LOT of information to convey, and I eventually assured him that I was paying very close attention to where we were throughout our tour, and if he could remember later where he was when he got the tidbits he parsed out to me, I could connect them to their rightful places in my mental files.

Armory foundation and the central tower.

The Girl demonstrated tower wall thickness, and window smallness.

We climbed the tower ourselves, before the tour began, for an aerial view of the city below us.  The base of the tower, in local custom, had at one point been used as a prison, and was later converted for use (a door was installed) as a store room.

Tower stairs

The view from the top.  (click to enlarge)

Most of the castle has been rebuilt and restored from the rubble left at the end of World War II, among other destructive conflicts in the fortress's past, and the restoration continues.  Today, only the foundation remains of some of the outbuildings , but the castle's main walls show the overall size of the structure, and the central keep has been rebuilt and is used as a restaurant.

At one time, there really was a drawbridge. Entry by that entrance was strictly for the VIPs. Everyone else had to come in through an opening at the base of one of the walls, passing by five thick oak doors. Each of those doors would be barred when the castle was under attacks; vertical shafts would allow castle defenders to pour rocks, hot oil, and other unpleasantness on encroaching attackers.

Our tour took us through the grounds, and later underneath them, to tunnels which served two of the towers at the fortress's corners.  Cannon emplacements to protect from ground troops are at the lowest level, as is the bakery which fed the forces protecting the castle.  Our favorite nugget of castle knowledge: although bread was baked fresh every day, it was stored until it had begun to stale before serving it to the troops.  Fresh bread is delicious, and you want to eat a lot of it.  Stale bread is more of a chore than a pleasure, so you eat less.  Feeding the soldiers old bread meant feeding them less bread, which saved a lot of money.

Note the hole in teh ceiling directly above the fire ring. This room (well under ground, beneath one of the corner towers) is where defenders fired cannons at attacking ground troops. It is also where defending troops would stream out and attack any attacking forces which made it past the cannon fire.

Shelves in the bakery.

One of the vertical shafts above the commoners' entrance tunnel.

When we finished at the castle, we walked through town for a little while before dinner. It became a running joke that Germans love pizza, because we kept finding (and eating at) places that specialized in it.  It was a little strange for us Yankees, because when a pizza arrives at your table in Germany--even one meant for a single person--you notice two things. First, it is enormous. Second, it is never cut. You do that yourself.

Classy, totally non-threatening table lamps at an Italian restaurant in Germany.

See the common table knife beside this huge pizza?  And people think American portions are too big.