großer lychensee (11. 893)

Leaving the Haussee of Himmelpfort, we took a short trip through the tributary Wolblitz (the river‘s name meaning the Little Havel in Old Slavic) for a really magical route with wooden bays and tight curves all to ourselves and crossed into the public dock in Lychen.  We walked around the town for a bit and had a nice lunch at a former coffee mill and rostery.  One the way back to the boat, we passed the the historic home of one Johann Kirsten who circa 1900 invented the push pen, thumbtack, whose present occupant had somewhat appropriately it seemed established a Museum of Fake News, using the windows as a bulletin board for made-up headlines.  The weather turning windy and rainy and not much time left in the day for traveling, we returned to the campsite by the lock in Himmelpforte and had our pitch still waiting for us—although our neighbors had moved on, an older couple who had been on the waters since May and had been working their jobs remotely thanks to the pervasive WiFi coverage with the company of their two adventurous cats.  

synchronotpica

one year ago: assorted links to revisit (with synchronoptica), a pristine tomb discovered in Naples plus a fully outfitted station wagon

eight years ago: more links to enjoy, the Altamura Man plus Parliament under repair

nine years ago: the Best of Reddit

ten years ago: parenting around the world 

eleven years ago: debt-limits and default

coeli porta (11. 892)

 

Departing Röblinsee through the Fürstenberg lock and crossed the canal into Stolpsee, and although intending just to stop at a municipal harbour to check out the town, we ended up staying moored at entrance to Himmelspfort, the spot turning out to be idyllic, essentially all to ourselves and aligned with what we envisioned camping by boat would be. After we got settled, we took a look at the ancient town named for a former Cistercian monastery, abandoned and left for ruins after sacralisation but the adjacent brewery founded by the monks was still intact and active.

The town is also known for its Weihnachtspostamt, upholding a tradition began by two postal workers in 1984 when they started answering children’s letters to Santa Claus (the Weihnachtsmann in East German times)—the whole town kind of has a Christmas theme and today, the postal service answers around three-hundred thousand letters from all over the world, but apparently is only one of seven addresses in Germany for such dispatches.

 synchronoptica

one year ago: fantastic spiralling art with AI (with synchronoptica), a graphic design collection curated by Kristen Lound plus LEGO as a media for fine art

seven years ago: murderous dioramas, proposed sovereignty for a Great Lake plus Japanese bathroom ghosts

eight years ago: Obama to his successor on unfinished business, solar plasma eruptions, a new front in the Cola Wars plus early canned, robotic music

nine years ago: holiday creep

ten years ago: the Ebola outbreak, stealing drug-offenders identities plus the landed gentry unchanged for a thousand years 

finowsee, woblitzsee, drewensee und zurück (11. 891)

Leaving the habour, we hooked up and to the north through a narrow channel that led to the Greater and Lesser Priepert lakes through the Finowsee that forms a round bend in the river.We pasted underneath the Hausbrücke Ahrensberg, a covered bridge (one of the few intact in northern Germany) that spanned the crossing to Drewensee.

 

 

Taking a long canal through the forest, we arrived at the inlet to Woblitzsee and stopped in the small town of Wesenberg to walk the dog and have a late lunch. The place is dominated by a high Middle Ages hilltop fortress (Turmhügelburg).

 

The lock at the outlet turned out to be the the most powerful one in the network of waterways with the floodgates really powerful instead of the usual sinking and rising and ended up passing through twice in rather quick succession as the anchorage we planned to stay at on the way to Neustelitz was closed for the season.Rather than risk getting stuck somewhere after the locks closed, we headed back to the first camp by Fürstenberg, seeing some of the boating lesson in practise and navigating the buoys which warn of hazards and the course to take that switch depending on whether one is travelling up- or downstream, and arrived just at sunset.

holidays are jollidays (11. 829)

Via the always excellent Nag on the Lake, we are directed to a retrospective exhibition of nostalgic photographer John Wilfrid Hinde whose carefully staged compositions influenced the style of picture postcards made famous through his commissioned series of Butlin’s holiday camps from the 1960s through the early 70s. Founded by Billy Butin in 1936 after a frustrating stay at a bed-and-breakfast in Wales during which he found himself locked out of the accommodations by his landlady during the day (common practise at the time) and was inspired to create seaside resort destinations that were affordable or the working-class with plenty of amenities and excitement. During the immediate post-war period, they were extremely popular with the franchise spreading across Britain, Ireland and the Bahamas but succumbed in the 1970s and 1980s to cheap package holidays to the Mediterranean. Most of the facilities are closed and long demolished or repurposed (see previously), with a few exceptions like the pictured pool lounge of Bognor Regis, but all the parks with attractions like heated pools, monorails, gondolas, sports facilities, stages for theatrical performances and rides but have a living legacy in the millions of postcards meticulously framed by Hinde.

waldberg/sandberg (11. 789)

For a quick overnight camping trip, we travelled to the collective municipality (Gemeinde) of Sandberg in Lower Franconia in the valley on the opposite side of the Kreuzberg, cleared and settled from heavily wooded land in 1691 to alleviate overpopulation in neighbouring villages, which though remote had too many people to sustain their subsistence farming and forestry due also by dint of their isolation had been spared waves of the plague. A remnant of their survival remains in the singular dialect of the villages that make up community that are verging on the unintelligible from one settlement to the next. In the Kirchdorf of Waldberg where the campsite was that was supposedly the case as well. The above increasing numbers of residents through the nineteenth century put stress on the fields and pastures due to their sandy soil (hence the name) and from the 1830s through the next century saw a mass immigration to America, many families from this area settling in Cleveland, Ohio.

The main building of the campgrounds was an old mill (dating from before an incident during Holy Week pilgrimages to the Kreuzberg when bakers from Waldberg tried to sell their wares but the main town of Bischofsheim asserted their monopoly over baked goods and saw its operations shut down—those who remained resorting to seasonal work, fruit-pressing and collecting berries and beechnuts to survive, relying on remittances from family abroad) on a watercourse coming down from the mountain.

 synchronoptica

one year ago: US Republican primary debates (with synchronoptica) plus assorted links worth revisiting

five years ago: the company Kalashnikov is making an electric car, a typical White House press briefing, drought reveals ominous hunger stones plus one French community’s fight to keep McDonald’s out

eight years ago: a word for St Bartholemew’s Day

nine years ago: more Venus Flytrap weirdness

eleven years ago: Six Degrees of Wikipedia plus Staffordshire pottery

 

 

katzenkopf ii (11. 742)

Over the weekend, H and I returned with our neighbours and dogs to Frankish wine island of Sommerach, on the loop of the River Main. As the namesake of our campsite, it has one of the more famous and well-distributed vineyards of the region and dating from 1901, the one of the oldest cooperatives (Winzergenossenschaft) in Germany—we get most of our wine from the grocery stores from this area.

Landscaped by the creation of the canal connecting Volkach and Gerlachshausen (see above), the steep sloping hills and unique conditions of the soil, loamy and ancient limestone have made this spot particularly well suited for viticulture for untold generations. 

 For this visit, we toured more of the town and wandered the streets lined with individual wineries (Weingüter)—including a few with vending-machines after attending one tasting—which came to our campsite—and another in the historic Zehnthof, which delivered the cases we selected to the campground the next morning. Many of these buildings sourced to bureaucracies and tax regimes, began in medieval times because these “tithe farms,” originally storehouses for a tenth of harvests (see previously) collected by governing monasteries and other beneficent organisations from farmers individually were later given to a commissioned decimator to collect from tenants—the warehouses (see also) becoming stately manor homes for the overseers. 

 With the the end of ecclesiastical estates, this institution fell in the hands of prominent vintners representing the local industry. According to local lore, the name Katzenkopf comes from a woman who tried to dissuade her husband from drinking wine straight from the barrel and succeeded finally by frightening him into sobriety with a stuffed cat—otherwise a quick swat as a term for light corporal punishment of blow with the knuckles to the forehead.

 synchronoptica

one year ago: a banger from Madonna (with synchronoptica) 

seven years ago: Russia displeased with continued sanctions, emotional granularity plus drone delivery

eight years ago: a poem by Brian Bilston, a elevated superbus plus Thomas Edison’s clickbait

nine years ago: a visit to the Rennsteig plus more on Venus Flytraps

ten years ago: armchair coaching, Israel eavesdropping plus indoctrinating radio

cascata della froda (11. 662)

Returning to the Castelvecca area, we took a nice stroll the the forest to see the waterfalls cascading from the top of Monte Cuvignone from a height of a hundred meters and carving out a space suggesting an amphitheater above the collecting pools.  

Along the trail through Montegrino-Valtravaglia, part of the fiefdom of il Quattro Valli, there is evidence of past use for aquaculture and raising trout with characteristic enclosures as well as the remains of an ancient stone quarry where petroglyphs have been recently discovered and are under study.

maccagno inferiore (11. 660)

We took a nice stroll through the village and explored the oldest part of the settlement with the Oratorium Madonna della Punta, a sanctuary with grottoes at the head of the old harbour. 

A path around the road tunnel at the beginning of the city crossed over the street and continued into the maze of alleyways and picturesque residences that formed around the core of the imperial tower and mint (Zecca). 

We got a little lost in the passageways but eventually found our way and returned via the promenade along the beach, the weather turning stormy again and the water roiling with waves.

 

synchronoptica

 

one year ago: superlative drone photos (with synchronoptica), Ziggy Star-Dust retires, assorted links to revisit plus composer Ligeti

 

seven years ago: farming brackish land plus election integrity commissions

 

eight years ago: more links to enjoy, more recycled calendars, machine made logos plus the socio-economics of Star Wars vs Star Trek

 

nine years ago: philosopher Avicenna, even more links worth revisiting plus the American Revolution framed as a mistake

 

ten years ago: shifting contractions