the sixteenth day

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This post is about an 8km walk from Blankenau to KleinHeiligkreuz. It’s my birthday, and I gorge myself after walking only very little.

In the morning I had breakfast with Judith and Berthold, then I filled up my thermos flasks with hot water and got going. I had never told them it was my birthday. I didn’t want them to feel weird.

the mist

The world was covered in fog. Not thick fog like the one I had waded through during my early China walking days, or later in Uzbekistan. Rather, it reminded me of the fog in Georgia: it was like a thin veil that covered all the things in the distance.

I took a forest path, and when I arrived at a bench I sat down and had my birthday lunch. It was the same as usual: bread with lentil spread and bell pepper, but today I also had an apple pie that was partially covered in chocolate, so that was pretty dope.

I was conscious of my flask, the one that Andreas the Austrian had given me a few months earlier. It was filled with a Japanese rice vodka called Ukiyo that tasted very weird but also very delicious. I was planning to drink it for my birthday.

the tree

But then Norbert appeared. He was disassembling the electric fence surrounding his pasture. The cows had come in for the winter, he said.

We talked for a while, and when we realized that a tree had fallen across the path and was blocking it, Norbert helped me move the Caboose around the tree and over the fence.

the drink

And then I was in the fields again. Darkness was starting to consume the forest and the hills around me, and I could see the lights of a fancy hotel down below. Norbert had advised me to go there and get a room for myself, and I thought that was a good idea.

I got out the flask and drank my vodka in the rain.

pictures

the walk from Blankenau to KleinHeiligkreuz:

Judith in front of her farm

sheep in the morning mist

Blankenau

esoteric bench

birthday lunch

birthday pie

had to navigate around a fallen tree

Norbert helped me get around the tree

cheers to whoever came up with The Longest Way

I sit with the Caboose in the rain on my 42nd birthday.

happy

my room in a nice hotel

pumpkin soup

vegetarian dumplings

walnut ice cream