And we were on the road again. Today, we took off for a weekend with my sister, who lives in the “way north” of Germany, not far from Kiel. We got up extra early, and with regional trains and two changeovers (in Bremen and in Hamburg), it took us all morning to get to Neumünster (one cancelled train and minor extra wait included). My sister Judith picked us up around 1:30, and we took off for their home in rural Schleswig-Holstein, the northernmost German state, which borders on Denmark.
We were greeted by her husband Michael and their cat Toji, whom we had not had the pleasure to meet before. Toji is awesome–very social, very independent, and living a cat’s best life: outside all night with tons of little rodents to hunt, and sleeping on Michael and Judith’s bed all day. We had a lovely lunch, and then used a gray and threatening-looking afternoon (and the actual downpour that followed) to drive to a nearby village, Trappenkamp, to the Café Friedrich, where we had SIX pieces of cake between the four of us. We also spent some time in another “wait out the rain” store with cheap junk, which was fun. Michael bought water pistols because that will be his strategy to deal with dogs on his morning run. He was recently bitten while running (and the owner injured when pulled along the dog’s leash) and a friend recommended this strategy to ward off future attacks. German dogs are usually so well-behaved, so the story really surprised me. But: cats are our chosen animals.
Then the weather cleared up, and we went for a lovely two-hour hike in a very quiet, rural area of serene Northern German beauty, through corn fields and little woods, and along several older farm houses and one bona fide estate, obviously formerly with horse stables (horse breeding used to be common here; the former estate that now holds the Zen Center of which Judith and Michael have been members for decades now was also a large horse-breeding operation). It was wonderful (if cool and quite windy), with great conversations, and of course there were birds for me to look at–we saw several red kites overhead, many little birds that were too fast for us to identify, and also hares and later a deer in the fields. (There was also a young deer peacefully munching away in the gorgeous garden below Judith and Michael’s apartment at the very edge of their village that evening).
We were home about 8, had a bite for dinner and talked a bit more, and then crashed around 10. Travel days are always a bit tiring, but I was so glad that we got that long walk in while the weather was behaving!