A photo per day, 2025 edition

This worked well in 2024, so here's the 2025 edition.

May 31-June 2: Malerweg

June 3: Dresden Semperoper with the Duke/UNC/NCSU research abroad cohort. We saw a staged performance of Handel's oratorio Saul. It was full of intrigue and politics and worked impressively well staged. We had seats near the ceiling, thus the stairwell photo.

June 4-6: Malerweg

June 7: Berlin with the research abroad cohort. On Saturday, we met up (because they used mass transit and I walked) at the East End Gallery (Berlin Wall).

June 8 morning: free time in Berlin with family--H, S, V, and R. We walked up Teufelsberg, a non-natural hill in the Grunewald district of Berlin built after WW2 from 98 million cubic yards of rubble and debris. It's located in the former West Berlin, and during the Cold War, the US built a large intelligence-gathering "listening station" on top. The station is no longer used and has become a street-art gallery, with almost every available surface covered in murals.

June 8 afternoon: Tour of the Reichstag with the cohort. 

June 9 morning: Our last day in Berlin. The cohort took a boat tour rather than join S and me for the long walk we invited everyone on. Ostensibly we were looking for the graves of the brothers Grimm, but we only got as far as the graves of the Familie Mensdelssohn in the Dreifaltigkeit cemetery in Kreuzberg. (We also visited the gravestone of grandpapa Moses Mendelssohn, the 18th-c. philosopher and theologian whose writings became central to the "Jewish Enlightenment" of the 18th and 19th centuries; he's buried in Berlin's oldest Jewish cemetery, which was desecrated during the Nazi era--to the point that his is the only gravestone still erect, but not in its original location).

R to L, Wilhelm Hensel, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Felix Mendelssohn...

June 9 afternoon: We had a little time to kill before our train, so zipped through the Alte Nationalgallerie with a few of the students. We happily revisited many of the Friedrich paintings that we had seen in New York, but the photo of the day goes to "Liszt am Flügel" (1840) by Joseph Danhauser, one of two music-historical paintings I recognized from across a room and of which could immediately say, "hey, that's George Sand swooning while Liszt plays the piano!" The other painting was "hey, that's Frederick the Great playing the flute!," a.k.a. Flötenkonzert Friedrichs des Großen in Sanssouci [1852] by Adolph von Menzel. I coulda sworn both paintings graced covers of Dover scores that I owned, but I can't identify which scores.

Liszt and his adoring fans...

June 10: Back in Dresden. I needed a walk, so  built a loop route to the Loschwitz neighborhood via the Blaue Wunder, and for the sake of thoroughness, included the recently enhanced gravesite of Caspar David Friedrich at the Trinitatisfriedhof.

June 11: Before meeting up for a farewell gelato with the students (they were staying on, but faculty advisors, including S, were leaving the next morning), we had some open time, so made a too-short visit to the Albertinum. The photo below is of the work Palianytsia (2022) by Ukrainian artist Zhanna Kadyrova. The work is made from sliced river stones. The accompanying label says the stones "become a symbol of welcoming culture and community in leaden times." It also notes that Russians' inability to pronounce the word Palianytsia correctly "became a phonetic identifier to distinguish 'friend' from 'foe.'" (And if you Google the word Palianytsia, you'll learn it's both a hearth-baked bread and the name of a Ukrainian turbojet drone missile system developed by Ukraine during the Russian invasion.)      

Palianytsia (2022) by Ukrainian artist Zhanna Kadyrova 

June 12: Early morning train home to Steinebach. On the way, we planned a layover of a few hours to visit Bamberg, nicknamed "Franconian Rome" because like Rome, it has seven hills.

June 13: first day back in Steinebach, and we were homebodies, walking no farther than to the grocery store and back. The new Edeka opened a year or two ago, so now instead of walking 3-4 mile RT to the old Edeka near Etterschlag, we only need to walk 1.6 miles RT.

Fence shadows in Kukuksheim, en route to EDK

June 14: Bastille Day = "No Kings Day" for over 5 million mostly USAmerican protestors mostly in the U.S. but also internationally. On our way to join a couple hundred protesters in Munich, we walked past the Weiße Rose Memorial at Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, and thought about the difference between showing up for protests every once in a while vs. risking everything to fight Fascism.

June 15: annual hike to Andechs. S biked, and we met up for Brez'n, Obazda, and Sprudel.

June 16: Strava says I went to the grocery store again. I was trying to figure out if I had allergies or a cold, and didn't take a single photo.

June 17: Hallbergmoos to Nordfriedhof.

June 18: Hallbergmoos to Freising. Afterward, I took trains to Seeshaupt, then walked to Bernried to meet up with S and friends from his college days in Hamburg. Afterward, S and I walked to Tutzing.

June 19-20: No photos. It was a cold, not allergies. 

June 21: Dinner at Sepperlwirt, followed by a walk "the long way home" to visit Favorite Lone Tree on a Hill, which is nowhere near Sepperlwirt.

June 22: Landshut to Moosburg

June 23: A doozy of a cold. I think I spent most of the day in bed.

June 24: Moosburg to Freising

June 25-27: What? No photos? I walked around the Wörthsee, and to Herrsching in the rain, and S and I walked to Eching before catching a bus to Puppi's for Kaffee und Kuchen and homegrown Johannesbeeren and Stachelbeeren.

June 28-July 12: Rorschach to Guendlischwand 

July 13: We had just walked 170 miles across Switzerland, so we took it easy. We bought groceries, and walked to Gasthaus Dietrich for dinner. We used to eat there regularly with Helen, but management changed after her death, and no one's really felt like it could compete with their memories of it. But it was pretty much how I remembered it, and we were rewarded with a rainbow over the house next door. 

July 14: We walked 5 miles to Stegen to meet family for dinner. Before the deluge, and before discovering the restaurant was closed, there were wild raspberries on the trail through the woods to Inning.

July 15: H, S, and V visited us from Berlin. More rain, but also a walk to the lake and sailing the model boat until the wind became too strong.

July 16: Dachau

July 17: Our German Romanticism summer ended with a two-day connect-the-dots walk from Lindau-Insel to Rorschach. The Rules of Walking permit virtual and real ferry connections, but we figured we'd make a land connection too. Our destination for the first night was Bregenz, where we enjoyed a modernized rendition of Der Freischütz: Carl Maria von Weber meets Gilbert and Sullivan meets Monty Python meets the Beaver Queen Pageant. I might have been the only audience member laughing out loud at the giant sprinklers during the lesbian dream sequence with diving mermaids. Check out the preview to appreciate how crazy the interpretation was (see also this behind-the-scenes video on stunts and staging).

Clap clap bravo clap brava clap clap clap bravo clap clap

July 18: From Bregenz, we continued on to Rorschach--a much more varied walk than the previous day's.

Uh, sure, that's a potato...

July 19: We walked to Puppi's for Kaffee und Kuchen with G, M, and M'. M' is heading to the U.S. this fall for a year abroad.

July 20: S biked and I walked to Herrsching, and we met up for gelato.

July 21: I made latkes for R and R'. On their way out, R' found a feather and told me I should save feathers for her (for what purpose, I don't know). It occurred to me that in ~550 miles of walking and hiking this summer, I hadn't noticed any feathers. S and I went for a walk afterward, and voilà...

July 22: We had some gummint business to take care of in Starnberg. Afterward, I walked to Tutzing. I've now walked the entire length of the western shore of the Starnbergersee. Tutzing has a promenade named after Johannes Brahms, who lived there for four months in the summer of 1873 while he was avoiding visiting Clara Schumann, with whom he was having a spat.

July 23: One more visit with Puppi that involved some contortions with train and bus schedules, followed by a lovely evening walk as far as Inning and then a bus home.

And that was that...

Munich to Landshut in four easy stages

There's a Bavarian joke that goes something like this: Kasimir and Beppo are hired by the highway department to paint stripes on a long road. On the first day, they both paint 50 meters. On the second day, Kasimir paints another 50 m, but Beppo only paints 25. On the third day, Kasimir again paints 50, but Beppo paints only 4.5. On the The fourth day, the job manager pulls Beppo aside and says, "Kasimir is painting 50 meters every day, but you're painting less and less. What's going on?" Beppo replies, "well, each day the can of paint is further and further away."

I somehow decided that I should work on connecting my 2023 Donausteig hike to my meanderings around Munich, and that I'd start this summer by hiking as far as Landshut. My original plan was to do this over three days, but then I caught a cold and felt less speedy, so I did it in four instead, with endpoints determined by the availability of train stations so I could take trains home every afternoon. And whaddya know, my hikes got further and further away, just like Beppo's can of paint. So in addition to the miles hiked, I'll note that this adventure also included almost 12 hours going back and forth on trains--which is a lot if you're doing this four days in a row, but tolerable if you're taking time off between days to process a cold.

Prior to hiking to Landshut, I had recorded walking as far north in Munich as the Nordfriedhof U-Bahn stop (although I've walked farther north than that--just not since I've been recording miles). Thus:

Day 1: Hallbergmoos south to Nordfriedhof

Day 2: Hallbermoos north to Freising

Day 3: Landshut south to Moosburg

Day 4: Moosburg south to Freising

The north/south choices were based on travel time: once north of Freising, trains take as much as 20 minutes longer heading south than north (e.g. Steinebach to Moosburg takes 86 minutes, but Moosburg to Steinebach takes 105 minutes). As much as I would have liked to follow the Isar north all the way from Nordfriedhof to triumphantly enter and hang out in beautiful Landshut, I was happy to change the narrative and save myself 20 minutes a day on trains.

Day 1: Hallbergmoos south to Nordfriedhof. To alleviate the monotony, or perhaps because I was feeling a cold coming on and wanted to expend energy while I still had it, I jogged part of the way

Day 2: Hallbermoos north to Freising

More of the same, but with airplanes, a river naturally rerouting itself and reshaping the riverbank as it went, and a Dom.

Happy 1300th birthday, Freising! 

St. Sebastian, judging from the arrows...

https://www.eder-orgelbau.de/restaurierung-renovierung/freising-dom-mari%C3%A4-geburt/

Day 3: Landshut south to Moosburg

S had never been to Landshut, so after I spent a few days sleeping off my cold, S, his bicycle, and I took a train to Landshut together. The city was delightful...

St. Martin's steeple is the 2nd tallest brick structure
in the world without stainless steel supports

Frescoes inside date to ~1500 CE

After visiting the castle grounds, S and I parted ways--he to bike back to Steinebach, and I to walk to Moosburg. The route to Moosburg followed the freeway for a long time. Between Eching and Moosburg, there was little shade on a hot, hot day, and I had forgotten my sun hat. And Moosburg--"the oldest town between Regensburg and Italy" (presumably the current Italian border)--was oddly uninspiring, perhaps because of disastrous fires in 1702 and 1865 and becoming host to the largest prisoner-of-war camp in Nazi Germany during WWII.

Leaving Landshut

Past Eching

The Beaver: Rodent of the Isar

Secrets of Beavers I

Apparently it's a secret that beavers are protected.
Do not shoot them. Spread the word.

Shade!

Long thattaway, long thisaway. TRVTH. At the top of the
hill is the Isar, channeled through a long series of locks.

Day 4: Moosburg south to Freising

After the underwhelming hike from Landshut to Moosburg, I didn't have high hopes for the stretch between Moosburg and Freising--but rolling hills and bucolic landscapes proved me wrong.

iNaturalist says this is a field of potatoes

Following train tracks beats following freeways

Storks are welcome in Thonstetten

Lots of "Moos" and lots of "-ham" in these here parts. From Old English hām to
German heim, the suffix refers to homesteads, as in Birimingham and Nottingham. 

15th-c. pilgrimage church on the outskirts of Langenbach--a nice truffle

View from the truffle. The two Isar nuclear power plants went offline in 2023. Why
make your own nuclear energy when you can buy nuclear energy from France?

At the southern end of Langenbach, I passed this painting, hung on the exterior wall of a house. So many people look at paintings and mutter, "I could have painted that," but they never do. Here, someone did. Kudos.

Blaues Pferd n + 1

Here's Franz Marc's version, which hangs in the Lenbach house:

Blaues Pferd I (1911)

Ta da! ~50 miles and 1,400 ft elevation gain, cuz the Isar flood plain is pretty flat.

Taking the train back and forth was a little tedious, even if the Deutschland Ticket made it cheap, and I suspect the scenery between Landshut and Passau or Deggendorf (where the Isar dumps into the Donau/Danube) doesn't warrant staying in hotels, so it's quite likely that this point-to-point hike has reached its end.