trash panda

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This post is about a 15km walk from Laubach to Ulrichstein. I take a self portrait with a horse and then I see a raccoon.

I spent two nights in the communal kitchen of the camp ground, hanging out with the other campers, waiting out the rain. I also took a hot shower and did my laundry.

horses

Then I got going. The sky had cleared up beautifully. There was a road that led out of the back of the camp ground and into the hills. It turned into a forest path covered with yellow leaves, and it was very quiet.

At one point I ran into a group of horses on a pasture. They stood there for a little while, staring at me and the Caboose, then they came closer. I took a self portrait with the bravest of them, a brown horse that decided to nibble on my hair.

rain

Then the weather turned bad again, and I put on my poncho. Had there been a single day without rain since my departure from Frankfurt? It didn’t seem so.

I ran into more horses, a lady with her granddaughter, and another lady on a horse. The thing with horses on the road was that they always got freaked out about the Caboose. So I set her down and didn’t move, trying not to startle the horse. It took a few nervous steps off the path anyway.

invasive species

It was dark and my feet were wet when I noticed the raccoons. Or rather: I didn’t recognize them at first. The only thing I could see was a pair of shiny dots in the distance, and then another one, and another one. Must be a family of cats, I thought. I was preoccupied with finding a way out of the fields anyway.

But then the pairs of eyes disappeared in a tree, and something about their climbing seemed to be different from that of cats. So I looked up at the tree with my head torch, and there they were: two trash pandas hugging the tree, staring at me in total silence.

“Yo,” I said to them, “you guys are on the wrong continent!”

I had never seen a raccoon in my time in America, and yet here we were, staring at each other in the darkness.

pictures

the walk from Laubach to Ulrichstein:

Caravanpark Laubach

I DON’T HAVE TO DO JACK SHIT

my place on the camp ground

the forest road out of Laubach

horses near Laubach

fallen tree on a forest road

I sit in the rain near Ulrichstein

cows in the hills

the road near Ulrichstein

monochrome horse

monochrome horse

rider

village bank near Ulrichstein

curious cows

tractor driving past me in the night

raccoon near Ulrichstein