This post is a little late, but I wanted to share some photos from a weekend in the mountains over the summer solstice in June. In Germany the summer solstice is called the “Sonnenwende” (literally means sun-turn) and they have a tradition of climbing the nearest hill/mountain and building a bonfire to celebrate the start of summer. We hiked up to a hut, had dinner, and then continued to the summit to build a little fire of our own. Unfortunately it was somewhat rainy and there wasn’t much dry wood to be found, but we managed to get a small one going in the end. From high in the Alps we had a good view and could spot a good dozen other fires in the distance.I also tried some geocaching for the first time. The way it works is that with the help of a handheld GPS receiver and a few clues, you search for markers people have constructed. Sebastian downloaded the coordinates of three geocache locations and we had fun searching for the Tupperware containers. We found two out of three which wasn’t bad, although we were a little disappointed at the “treasures” inside (Kindersurprise toy, 50 cent gas coupon for having used an Autobahn reststop and an IKEA pencil) but to be fair we really didn’t have anything cool of our own to swap out.
The thrill of discovery:
Here is one summit we couldn’t figure out how to get to (in Germany mountain summits are marked with crosses). To the left of the cross is what we thought was our hut perched on a cliff.
But that turned out to be a storage shed, with the real hut (on the left) being a little roomier:
Waiting for sunset at the summit to start a fire and enjoying the views.
Kathrin starting to build our fire, looking pretty positive given all the wet wood we started with.
