baltic avenue or gravity's rainbow

H and I have just returned from a camping--though not actually roughing it, holiday, spanning as H points out the entire length of the former German Democratic Republic, from Thuringia to the lighthouse at Kap Arkona at the northern tip of the Island of Rügen. 

Lazily making the transition from one, beautiful, clean and uncrowded beach to the next, we saw many remarkable things and took in a lot of history, including Werner von Braun's rocket facility at Peenemunde, which saw the first launch into outer space, ancient fishing villages, buildings bleached white and authentic and justified martitime decor, outstanding natural beauty, the chalky cliff face at the Jasmunder Bodden,

to the endless coastlines of Usedom, to our final campsite and headquarters at the Kraft durch Freude (KdF) seafront resort ruin of Prora, built to accomodate some twenty-thousand holiday-makers and some 4.5 kilometers long but never used used for that purpose.

It was absolutely outstanding to be nomadic and take away so many impressions, even more than I can list here, while sustaining the relaxation that should come with the standard--or non-standard two-weeks' vacation, and cannot wait for the next adventure.

 

im urlaub

H and I are touring the exquisite Baltic coast, and PfRC is on sabbatical too.  Please check out Our Little Travel blog for further adventures.

mucke

As H and I prepare for our next flying carpet adventure to the Baltic coast, I have been thinking a bit about the lowly mosquito, girded to be made a little mad.  Apparently, and I think later in the vacation season, the shores turn into a stew of exhausted ladybugs, but I don't know what the tiny wildlife has in store besides this spectacle.  Mosquitos have a brief and dreary existence, mostly in the form of nymphs in stagnant water.  In there adult stage, and here's a fun fact: only the females bite but only the males buzz, so I guess one need not worry about swatting when there is the microscopic bleating of an insect, only when there's not.  Further, the female mosquito only sucks blood not for herself but to nourish her eggs.  As adults, mosquitos do not even have proper digestive systems, only having emerged from the swamps to reproduce.  Considering malaria and all the other ills visited on humans by flying pests, it seems like a lot of unnecessary sound and fury.  And though the peddlers of insecticides would argue, I'm sure, it seems that the geraniums on our balcony make a pretty effective chemical barrier against unwanted carousing.

(UNCLASSIFIED)

With news of a successful bust of a Russian espionage ring by the FBI, using technology of all things but probably not James Bond Q gadgetry, still reverberating, I recall a very matter-of-fact expose on the corporate spy situation in Germany.  Though the actual particpants seem right now to be fairly pedestrian, the whole idea of pervasive spying, escalation of operatives sounds very romantic, to have a secret existence just beneath the surface, Mati Hari and swinging sixties and Spy versus Spy.  I wonder about the neighbors in the Little Odessa compound across the street and what trade secrets they could be trafficking out of Bad Karma.  The US bust probably was wanting for better timing since Obama had just shared his Bush-Putin moment with Dmitry Medvedev in a DC burger joint, and apparently the Russian spies employed such dastardly techniques as invisible ink and the US post office.  Sometimes, though this is an awful thing to let one's mind wander about during a classic movie, I imagine how short, brutish and uninteresting vintage mysteries would be cellular phones or *69.  Mystery solved, oh that was exhausting, what's next?  Maybe the Russians kept ahead of US intelligence for all these years because no one who stoop so low to cobble shredded documents back together or deem anything not electronic worthy of serious investigation.  I remember writing secret messages with lemon juice and then magically revealing it by holding the paper over a toaster.  Maybe spying will return to martinis and Aston-Martins after all.