zelda

Posted on May 25, 2023 by Christoph Rehage

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This post is about a 29km walk from Hößgang to Mitterkirchen. I’m on the wrong way for a bit, then I arrive at a giant oak.

I woke up in the garage, went to the restroom to brush my teeth and wash my face, then I packed everything together. Manuela, after cooking me a tasty dish of eggs and vegetables for dinner and spending much of the evening talking with Wolfgang and me, had handed me a small package wrapped in aluminium foil. “For breakfast.”

strudel for breakfast

It turned out to be one of the strudel pies her restaurant was so famous for. And so I sat in the morning sun looking over the lake and ate my strudel. It was delicious.

Then I got going.

I walked about 4km until I reached a bridge across the Danube. There was a restaurant where I asked if I could fill up my hot water thermoses, then I crossed the bridge and continued walking on the other side.

The bike path went parallel to a busy road and a railroad track for a while, until it veered off and cut through the fields and the forests.

It was very quiet and very awesome.

no entry

Until it stopped. The pavement had disappeared a while earlier, and there were hardly any other people around. Good for me, I thought. But then, after about 2km, I arrived at a turnpike and a sign that said NO ENTRY FROM MAY TO JUNE. It was apparently wood-cutting season. Motherfuckers couldn’t have told me that a half hour earlier? I thought as I made my way back to the last fork in the road.

I had walked almost 30km when I finally arrived at the 500-year-old oak. It was so old and big that it had its own entry on Google Maps, and it stood in the middle of some fields that were surrounded by forest. The late afternoon sun was golden and low, and there were thousands of little flies dancing around in it, as if they were celebrating something. It was like a scene out of Breath Of The Wild.