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Katrin Hieroglyphs.
23. Februar 2024
Yes, that would sort of fit that aspect - but you can also go from bits of woods to sticks if you ar...
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AUG.
08
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I am back!

I'm back from a lovely, long summer break - it was definitely very summery and quite, quite hot. In fact, it was hotter than I'd have needed... 

We spent some time with friends, and went on holidays to Finland to see the midnight sun. If you're used to nights being dark, even at the height of summer, it feels surreal to be in a place where it just doesn't get dark at all. We made good use of the night light - and had naps in the afternoon to make up for that, too.

Finland is a really beautiful country, with a lot of forest and an incredible amount of lakes. Our plan was to do some lake exploration via canoe, so we had a rental canoe for a few days, a map of a part of the lake district... and, unfortunately, a lot of (head)wind. So much wind that we had to change our plans regarding the tour and shorten it a bit. After all, we were on holidays and not on a torture-yourself-mission...

It was nice to paddle, though we had underestimated two things: the size of the lakes and the amount of summer cottages on their shores (and on the islands in the lakes). Having paddled the German Mecklenburger Seenplatte, I was subconsciously expecting something similar only larger - and yes, the Finnish lake district is much larger, but the lakes themselves also are much, much larger. That means a lot of open water to paddle through. Now that, in decent weather and by itself, is technically not a problem - but it felt like we were not getting ahead at all, because the perspective on those large lakes, when you are paddling towards something in the far-ish distance, just does not change much. We usually paddle at about 4 km per hour if on flat water with no significant wind influence, which is not so fast that you can see things change quickly... hence it felt, sometimes, like standing at one point and paddling forever. It got better, at least for me, towards the end of our tour, since you sort of learn that it just feels like you're in one spot but you are actually moving, but the general effect was still there.

The second underestimated thing really were the cottages. I knew that in Finland, having a summer cottage is totally a thing and about every family has at least one - but I never made the next step in thinking about this: All these cottages have to be somewhere. That's just logical, right? Well, one premium spot to put a summer cottage is, obviously, in a nice, quiet, secluded(ish) place on the shore of a lake... which meant that there were some stretches on our trip where you could not land your canoe unless you wanted to do so on somebody's more-or-less front lawn.

So basically, you were in nature, with very few other humans to be seen, but with traces of human habitation and civilisation everywhere (in form of the cottages, mostly). There was very little in terms of infrastructure though - no cafés or shops like you'd find at every stone throw in Mecklenburg. We had brought our own food, and water logistics stuff (a filter and a UV water sterilisation pen, because you don't want to catch a nasty stomach bug especially while on holidays), and that was quite necessary. We also had our trusty little tent and put that up on our own tiny private islands for several nights, which was a lot of fun and felt really special for us. (In Finland, you can put your tent up about everywhere, though common decency demands not to do that on someone else's front lawn. In Germany, there's a general prohibition against so-called "wild camping"; you can ask the owners of land if you may put up your tent there, or use designated spaces which you can find in limited numbers in some areas, but you're not allowed to just pitch it anywhere else. In many areas, that means you need to find the next commercial campsite... which will be populated with other people and cost you money, but - on the upside - will provide you with sanitary installations and typically a little shop, café, and the possibility to get fresh baked goods in the morning. However, all that means that just going "ah, here's a nice spot, let's use that" is not something we're used to.)

Our method of travel - trains and ferries - also worked very well. Going all the way up north that way did take a good bit of time altogether, but most of our travelling was done at night, with overnight ferries and night trains, and that was very, very pleasant. We had planned the journeys basically so that we would travel in the night and then spend the day in the town before moving on through the night again. It means declaring the journey a part of the holidays, and that was what we did, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I can highly recommend this! Finnish night trains are also quite nice and comfy, and you can even have a 2 person cabin with your own toilet and shower. So you spend a nice day wandering a city, doing a bit of sight-seeing, then go to the train station in the evening, board your train and have a relaxing hot shower while racing through the Finnish landscape before crawling into bed - and then you wake up the next morning somewhere else. Ah, it's just wonderful.

(If you're planning travel like this, and you use a train to get to your night travelling thingie, make sure you leave enough of a time gap before your night train or ferry leaves, just in case your previous transport is delayed for some reason. It will make the overall travel time a bit longer, but reduces stress immensely - and you can always go for a little stroll to stretch your legs if you are on time, and have a coffee or something to eat a few metres away from the train station.)

And now it's time to get back to good old work! There's a few projects to finish, and other things coming up, such as the embroidery demonstration in Brandenburg. First, though: Sending off all the orders that arrived during the summer break. 


(This post, weirdly, did not have its correct date when I posted it, but one in June. Don't ask me how that happened.)

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OKT.
08
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Things That Happened During Summer Break (part 8)

And after NESAT... holidays! Well, a few days of work inbetween, which included sourcing, portioning, packing, and sending off fabrics for a school project:



That was a fun thing to do - and I'm looking forward to hearing how it all played out!

After that, though, finally: Holidays. With the pandemic still a factor, we had been thinking about what to do for the holidays, and in the end, we had decided to do a bicycle tour again. Our last one was several years ago (paddling and hiking came inbetween), and The Most Patient Husband of Them All had wanted to do the Bodensee-Königssee-Route for a long time now, so in the end, that was what we chose to do. It was clear before that we had more days than the tour would be good for, so the plan was to ride the train down to Lindau with the tandem, then do the tour, and afterwards cycle homewards as far as we'd get.

Well. That plan did not survive its encounter with reality or, to be more precise, the strike of the train personnel... so we ended up going by train for a short bit, then cycling a bit, then catching a train that was actually going a few days later and riding down to Lindau. Never mind, though - our plan was to have fun on the bike, and that we did.

[caption id="attachment_6442" align="alignnone" width="300"] The bike, loaded up with all our gear.


The tour was wonderful, and quite hilly. We spent the nights in our tent and found out that campsites in that alpine area are ridiculously expensive compared to other places - but, well, they're still cheaper than staying in proper buildings, and the tent is a very good choice in pandemic times.

I usually take along something to read (ebooks for the win on trips like that), and something fun to do, and in this case, my pharaoh accompanied me. I did actually get around to do a little bit of weaving - not much, since the evenings were rather short daylight-wise - but enough to make me happy to have taken it along.

[caption id="attachment_6441" align="alignnone" width="300"] Proof of the travelling pharaoh!


I even managed to re-heddle and fix a heddling mistake! That was very satisfactory.

Altogether, we cycled close to 1000 km, with two rest days (one spent on the train to Lindau, and one spent at the Königssee). We also felt very old-fashioned and a bit odd with all the e-bikes zooming past us, especially on the two first days of the tour proper, where it was quite hilly and quite steep...

 
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SEP.
18
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Tales from the Summer Break (2)

For trekking beginners like us, the Forststeig was the perfect setup: Taking everything you need, and getting the experience of having to rely on what you brought, but with the option of finding a bus stop and getting out with only a few kilometres to walk at about any place during the trip. I'm not sure whether I would have dared to do a trip with a similar description (only for experienced hikers, it said) without that option. We had done a few trips before, especially to try how well we both could handle walking several days in a row with a pack, and how we'd cope with a rather heavy pack, but we still were not sure about the combination, and doing a multi-day hike with all the food, and sleeping in a tent, and so on.

Accordingly, there was a lot of planning beforehand, and more thinking about what to bring and what to leave at home than usually. Lots of weighing of stuff was happening. (Interestingly, women's underpants are much more lightweight than men's, but that advantage is completely eaten up again if you plan to bring bras, which are surprisingly heavy.) We did weigh about everything, partly because it was interesting, partly because it helped to decide which shirt or sweater to pack, and also because we tried to keep track of the ever-growing load we'd have to carry. It was a very good thing that most of our equipment was already chosen to be lightweight and relatively small to pack; it's not as crucial on bike trips, but it does of course help. There was more food-planning, of course, too. Usually, when on a bike or canoe trip, we have a "kitchen pack" which includes spices, a few kitchen tools such as a can opener and a peeler as well as sharp knives, and then we pack some essentials such as rice, pasta, couscous, oil, vinegar, coffee, tea, butter, jam, and so on. Then we rely on being able to buy fresh ingredients along the way, or eat out if we fancy it and get the opportunity. There's always at least a full meal's worth of ingredients in the pack though. The powdered tomato sauce packets sold for pasta are a staple fallback for this; in case there's nothing to be had anywhere, we can always have rice or noodles with tomato sauce. (We've had situations where that fallback was necessary, and much appreciated.)

This time, fresh stuff was mostly out, because of its weight and bulk. We took some snack veggies onto the train trip with us, and had them along for the very first day of walking, when they got consumed according to plan. Afterwards, it was dried stuff, and no fresh things at all - which was weird and very unusual. I did get my fix of freshness at least partly by picking blackberries whenever they presented themselves and looked more or less ripe, and there were a few late raspberries as well, but it was certainly far below the usual rate of greenery and fruit consumption.
Also much different to my usual meal planning, where I prefer things that are lower in caloric value, we tried to pack densely for the trip - and that did include nutritional value in regard to weight and bulk. Nuts were our friends, and I've probably never eaten so many nuts in a week before this. There was some wild guesstimating as to the number of calories required for a day, and some maths, and then there was writing of green numbers with the kcal values on each package, which did help a lot for the planning. It all added up in the end to about the amount we were guesstimating, and made for an astonishingly large pile of food. So large that we doubted it would all fit into the backpacks - but with careful squishing, and packing everything in as tightly as possible, and relegating tent and sleeping mats to the outsides of the backpacks, we did manage to pack everything.

We ended up with about 14 and 18 kg of pack weight, without drinking water (which added another one and 1.5 to 2.5 kg to the packs, respectively). That was quite heavy, but still manageable. It felt like about 80% of it was food (not quite true)... and the nice thing about having such a lot of food in the pack is that it will get lighter every day.

[caption id="attachment_5563" align="alignnone" width="216"] This pack contains... mostly food. Or so it felt!


So we went on the trip, and walked, and it was taxing, at times, but it was utterly wonderful, and we even had a lot of luck regarding the weather. There was one day when it was raining all day long, and that was by chance the one day that we spent evening and night in a hut. When we arrived there, someone was already there, the wood stove was on, it was nice and warm inside, and we could dry our wet things - heavenly!
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SEP.
17
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Tales from the Summer Break (1)

Now that I've posted the date-y things, it's time for some rambling about the summer break. First of all, and most importantly: It was wonderful. It was also full of things, both holiday-ish things and some work-related stuff that I finally got around to doing, and some household things, and a bit of cooking things, and some green living stuff. All of this is, in some ways, mashing nicely together. Which also means that I want to write about all of this, which will probably result in a long and rambling post that will be split at semi-random places to make a series of blog posts, because it's definitely way, way too much to go into a single one.

So. Let me set the scene...

First of all was our vacation, with a trip. Like about almost everyone, we spent our holidays this year in Germany (though we quite often do that, actually, since we both appreciate not having to travel for ages before or after). We had originally thought about going on a cycling tour in Denmark, but several different things, such as not being keen on spending 8+ hours on the train wearing masks, and some issues with the bike that are a bit more complicated and need to be fixed before a trip with heavy luggage, along with the usual C-19 issues of going abroad, made us change our plan. At least the bike issues meant that the decision what to do was easier: canoeing or hiking. We definitely wanted to use campsites as much as possible, which ruled out quite a few possibilities. That was especially the case with the hiking areas and hiking routes; a lot of them only have very few campsites along the route, and you need to spend nights in pensions, hotels or B&Bs. This would not be a real deterrent for us in a normal year, but this summer, we had indications that it might be rather full in German accommodations.

In the end, after researching quite a bit, we had almost given up on the hiking plan - and then I clicked one last link, and stumbled across something called the "Forststeig", and there we had it. The perfect hiking route for us: located in Saxonia, in the Elbsandstein area. This place is known for its spectacular sandstone formations - we had seen them when paddling on the Elbe last year, but it's very different again to explore them on foot.



The route is leading you through the forest with almost no contact with civilisation, with small campsites just for the Forststeig hikers. We were a bit unsure at first, as you have to carry all your food and take care about your drinking water underway, but we did decide to do it. Definitely a very, very good decision - it was glorious!

[caption id="attachment_5556" align="alignnone" width="225"] Stone steps in the middle of nowhere - a rather frequent occurrence.


The Forststeig leads you from Schöna to Bad Schandau, almost exclusively on small paths and trails. The route goes through Germany and the Czech republic, and on some parts, you walk right on the border between these two states. Because it's meandering to make sure you climb every hill (the steeper the better) and see every spectacular sight, the route manages to squeeze more than a hundred kilometres of trail into the area.

[caption id="attachment_5557" align="alignnone" width="225"] You can be sure that if there's a "comfy ascent" and a "steep ascent", the Forststeig will send you up the former.


It's very well marked (yellow lines on the trees), and there are campsites and a few huts for spending the night along the way. There's also one partner campsite near Bad Schandau, and one regular camping site in Ostrov. There's a scant handful of restaurants in the first half of the route, but there are no shops along the way. In fact, you're always as far away from civilisation as is possible. You're sometimes very close to the stones, though:

[caption id="attachment_5558" align="alignnone" width="300"] In some spaces, the stones are close enough together that my backpack touched both sides of the gap...


We walked about 12 to 18 km each day, with the packs slowly getting lighter. That was exhausting, but in a very good way - and it felt so good to be breathing fresh forest air all day long, and to have (mostly) silence, and then casual good company in the evenings when we'd see other hikers again at the bivouac sites. And because we all were outdoors all the time, there was no wearing a mask for days. You could almost forget there's a pandemic going on...
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DEZ.
19
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Winter Break.

It's time - for the winter break!

I had a wonderful year 2019, with really interesting conferences, several exciting and wonderful workshops and courses, a lot of travel, and many other good things. There was a bit of stress, too - of course there was! and I hope to get that under control even better in 2020. Overall, though, I won't complain about how 2019 went.

Now it's time to slowly wrap up the year (maybe in a towel or tea towel, because sustainability...) and get into holiday mood. I will be closing the shop over the holidays and take a blog break as well; both will be back in normal mode (together, hopefully, with my own self) on January 8.

So with this, I wish you



or, if you celebrate something else, Happy Holidays! and a good start into the year 2020.

2020. That is a weird number, somehow, and I'm looking forward to see what that year will bring.

Have good times with people you love, and I'll see you on the flip side!
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SEP.
12
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A few paddling pics - part II

There was, of course, not only paddling and looking at scenery and architecture. There was also hanging out to relax. And, importantly: There was coffee, and cake, and knitting.

[caption id="attachment_4817" align="alignnone" width="640"] Cake, coffee, and knitting socks in Torgau - not my knitting, mind you.


With 2019 being the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus, and the Most Patient Husband enjoying this style of architecture (I do, too, by the way), of course we had to plan enough time for our visit to Dessau. We did a little walk around the city and then went to visit the houses, which are partly turned into an info centre and partly into a museum, so you can get an impression of how they looked when they were in use originally:

[caption id="attachment_4816" align="alignnone" width="640"] Meisterhaus in Dessau


That was a very interesting part of the journey!

On the next day, we came back onto known territory: last year, we ran out of Saale before we'd run out of holiday time, so we continued down the Elbe to the outskirts of Magdeburg. This time around, though, we knew about the Pretziener Wehr before having paddled past it - and we took a little turn off the river into a flood canal to visit this very impressive weir.

We got stopped by the water levels, though - even for our canoe, it was too shallow for proper paddling. So we left our trusty Serenity and had a little walk.



Which was absolutely worth it. This weir was built in the early 1870s, and it is still in use, having been refurbished (somewhere between conserved and reconstructed) between 2003 and 2010.

[caption id="attachment_4815" align="alignnone" width="640"] Pretziener Tafelwehr


You can read more about the weir (in German only, unfortunately) on the Wikipedia page - and you can watch a video of it being opened during a flood in 2011 here.

Just like last year, we ended our trip in Magdeburg (though this time, we paddled to the other end of the city before stopping). We had a bit of a tour around, especially looking at the Otto von Guericke memorial spots:

[caption id="attachment_4813" align="alignnone" width="640"] Otto von Guericke and the Magdeburg hemispheres.


Since we were there, and it was on, we also visited a pottery market on the plaza in front of the cathedral. There may have been some buying of pottery (very restrained, though, knowing you have to carry it all home yourself makes restraint rather easy)

... and then our tour was over, and we cleaned and dried and folded and packed everything again.

[caption id="attachment_4811" align="alignnone" width="640"] Ready for the trip home... all packed up.


This time, we did a better job packing than the trips before (you learn as you go...) and getting through the train aisles was not a problem anymore. It's still a lot of luggage to handle, and you still need luck to have enough free space to put it, but that we did have and our ride back home went smoothly enough.

It's about 80 kg of stuff taken all together, by the way, with most of the weight being carried on the trolley thing - the boat, the paddles, the tent, and the kitchen equipment including some food. That makes the bulk of our stuff; the two backpacks are at about 15 kg each, and the stray blue IKEA bag contains our personal flotation devices plus some lighter-weight odds and ends, plus things that we need to have handy during the trip.

[caption id="attachment_4812" align="alignnone" width="694"] Our complete tour: a bit more than 330 km in 11.5 days of paddling.


It was a wonderful tour, and I loved being able to just pack up everything, hop onto the train and go home - no annoying fetching of a car from the start point of the trip. Which would have been another day, almost, as well: Going back by train all the way to Schmilka and then by car all the way to Magdeburg, and then home. It was definitely one of our better ideas to get a folding canoe!
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SEP.
11
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A few paddling pics - part I

Before the summer is all over, and the holiday pics get buried in the digital stack that is ever growing, here is how our paddling trip went.

We started out on the Elbe river close to the Czech border, in Schmilka, and got to enjoy the spectacular scenery there:

[caption id="attachment_4821" align="alignnone" width="640"] From Königstein to Pillnitz - Bastei near Rathen


We had very, very sunny weather, and it was really dry the weeks and months before, so just like last year on our Saale trip, water levels were very low. Which means that we had the river mostly to ourselves, no commercial vessels at all - as the water in the river was too low for them.

That made for very relaxed paddling wherever we wanted on the river, which was nice for us. The sunny weather also meant applying sunscreen generously, trying to get an early start for the longer days, and wearing sunglasses and hats as protection. So this is me, "hard" at work paddling:

[caption id="attachment_4822" align="alignnone" width="640"] Just taking out the paddle after steering...


We worked our way down the river, enjoying every bit of it. On some days, we really worked our way down - there was a headwind quite often. One time we stopped paddling for a short break and stayed completely in place... on a river that was technically flowing. (Not as fast as it would have been with higher levels, but still.) The wind was strong enough to sort of anchor us in place that day...

[caption id="attachment_4820" align="alignnone" width="640"] Wine grows here. As do beautiful buildings.


There was a lot of beautiful buildings as well - usually in scenic places on the higher places, right on the shoulder of the river valley. Wine grows in this area, and we often saw vinyards and wineries.

We made a lot of sightseeing stops along the way, of course - many interesting places with a lot of history are strung along the Elbe. One of them is Meissen (where we did not visit the porcelain manufacture, though, even though I come from a porcelain town - too far out from the river, and too many other things to see). While we had these very low water levels, we also saw marks from past high levels during floods. 2013 was a bad flood year, but in Meissen, we also found this mark from 1501, which was at about the same height:

[caption id="attachment_4819" align="alignnone" width="640"] High water mark at a building in Meißen - dating to 1501, when one of the bad floods of the Elbe occurred.


Another place where we stopped was Torgau, which was also well worth visiting, for the spectacular staircase in the castle alone - called "Großer Wendelstein":

[caption id="attachment_4818" align="alignnone" width="640"] Wendelstein in Torgau


One of the fairy tale film productions that the former GDR was famous for was filmed here: Sleeping Beauty. The actress is in one scene shown walking down these stairs...
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