7 quick takes

Schrammsteinaussicht

My habit to write a blog every Monday seems to be hard to keep now that we’re on the road. Instead I’ll try something else. I’ll just write a little something that happened at the end of each day. It’s not that I must produce a blog, but it’s a good way to preserve the memories when they are fresh. Here we go.

Monday – Oberlichtenau -The girls are in bed, the dishes are done, Hartmut is working , and I have time to write. And now you are asking: ‘Hartmut is working?’ Yup, he is. He missed work, and he always left the door open for some consultancy work that has now come through his old employer. It’s for an engineering project in Haiti, which works out well with the time difference as he can work when the girls are in bed. It’s only supposed to be one or two days a week anyway, so with some flexibility, he can fit most of those hours into the evening hours. I’m happy for him that he gets to do something he loves and that he stays ‘in the game’ as he puts it.
Tuesday – Dresden – When I researched ‘things to do in Dresden’, I stumbled upon what the girls would later call the 'coolest treasure hunt ever’. It involved two 130-year-old cable cars that were going up and down the mountain, a GPS-guided walk with beautiful views and interesting facts and loads of puzzles to solve. And if you got it right, you could figure out a code that you could use to unlock a box with a little present. Fortunately we got everything right, now we got a beautiful fridge magnet with one of the trams on it hanging in the camper.
Wednesday – Saechsischer Schweiz – Today is the day Sophie has been counting down to for weeks. Today Sophie turns 8! Sophie is our queen of party planning so she’s been giving us many (not so subtle) hints about how she wanted things so I was glad that I was prepared so that I could still surprise her. She woke up in a decorated camper, after which Sophie and I walked to a bakery to buy cake, to give Hartmut and Doris time to prepare our usual treasure hunt to find the presents. It was actually the first time that I bought a cake for a birthday and I told Sophie that she could pick whatever she wanted. The bakery had many different options that all looked amazing, but Sophie surprised me by choosing a very simple crumble-sheet cake (that tasted great though). There were presents, pancakes for lunch and soup for supper, just as she wanted. We did a cool hike (the best hike ever) and she beamed the entire day. We decided to spend the night in the mountains and had the most beautiful sunset. ‘Even heaven gave me a present!’ Sophie exclaimed. ‘And it was already the best birthday ever!’
Thursday – Sächsischer Schweiz – Up, up, up, we went. Every time I thought we could not go higher, there was another ladder, another set of stairs, another obstacle to get over. The steep sandstone mountains in ‘Saxon Switzerland’ are mindblowing beautiful but climbing them, especially with two little climbers, is not for the faint of heart. But we made it to the top! There, we were rewarded with what must be one of the most beautiful views in the whole of Germany. A perfect stop to devour the picnic that we had taken along while enjoying everything we saw (and getting minor heart attacks whenever the girls came too close to the edge). The Sächsischer Schweiz, with her bizarrely shaped rock formations, is a climbers' paradise (and a mother’s worst nightmare as every cliff is steep and scary), and I am so glad that we got to explore it a little.
Friday - Prague – It’s been a while that we’ve visited a place where we could not make any sense of the signs along the road. All the countries we have been to in the last years, I spoke the languages at least enough to understand what was going on, but it’s different in Czech Republic. The language, with a surplus of diacritical marks and seemingly a lack of vowels, sounds interesting, but seems hard to pronounce and even harder to understand. And I must say that I really like it that way. I like trying to figure out what things mean and how what I hear translates into what I see on paper. It’s exciting to be in a place where you don’t exactly know how things work because you have to depend a little more on the kindness of strangers to explain you things and that’s not a bad thing.
Saturday – Prague – Today I was grateful for Prague’s many churches, covered alleys and walkways and interesting shops as we needed roofs over our head to protect us against the rain. And even though we got pretty wet, Prague still managed to impress us. A lot. What a beautiful city. So many amazing buildings, so many cool colours, so many cobblestoned streets to explore! We tasted trdelník (delicious), found the most found geocache in the world (easy, but still cool), had a drink at a restaurant where trains brought your orders (a great way to wait for the worst rain to be over) and walked more steps than our feet liked.
Sunday – Prague – ‘Can we go to one of these really, really big churches?’ the girls had asked. ‘Not for sightseeing, but on a Sunday.’ We have been to many different churches already this trip; every Sunday we find a church to go to, but as we explore cities, we also like to pop into the old churches to see them from the inside. So now the girls wanted to see one of those ‘in action’. I looked up when the services in one of the biggest churches in Prague, the impressive ‘Saint Vitus Cathedral’ would be, and we made sure to be on time. Not that it was necessary; the enormous church wasn’t exactly packed with about 100 churchgoers. It was definitely a special experience to not walk around on a random day but to sit quiet in this enormous space, to take in all the beauty and at the same time wonder if Jesus would find that extravagant building really necessary.

The plan for this week is to drive South. First to Český Krumlov after which we plan to cross the border to Austria. There we hope to go to Linz, the place where Hartmut and I met, but never went back to, and Vienna. The weather doesn’t look all that great, so we might have to manage expectations about how much we can see and do, but we’ll see. The girls don’t mind. They like the hikes and the cities, but also love spending days building their Lego or making crafts. We’ll see. Either way it will be good. Have a great week!