August 2023
Time can sometimes feel going slow and fast at the same time. And so Zoe is going to school now. And I took a few photos on her first day.
Schultüte deep dive.
Pot party.
A photo day is always a good day! And so was this outing with Florian at Zeche Zollverein in Essen. See Florian’s photos here and here.
Switching to the Rolleiflex.
Zurück in den Urlaub
Behind the scenes.
Mum invited for lunch for her birthday.
They had no waiter staff, so someone of us had to take our orders.
On the train to Dortmund to see Gatecreeper and Converge at the Junkyard.
Frédéric picked us up at the main station.
Cheers guys! What an epic evening. Converge were just wrooaaahhh!
Schooling presents.
I bought some more LPs.
For the tree collection.
Friends had free tickets to a horse race here in Düsseldorf and invited us along.
Taking the bus to the horse races. Like the mob we are.
So much fun!
We didn’t do that!
I bet a whole €2. And lost.
Perfect shirt!
Surprise snapshot.
On the way to school.
For the creepy doll collection.
The “Zeitfeld” is a somewhat famous landmark in Düsseldorf.
My one bike. Love it!
Spent the evening in the park with Laurenz.
A BBQ at Elfi’s place.
A pizza and my other bike. Love that, too!
At the end of the month, Bernd and I planned to go on a multiday hike in Austria. We stayed at the good old “Alpeninferno”-hut before and after. For the hike itself, we could not and did not book anything. We were hoping to find somewhere to sleep. But we also brought a small tent in case that wouldn’t work out.
But it did!
Unfortunately, though, I did only spent one night out and about, as I broke my arm after I slipped at the end of day 2.
Let’s go! The wheather was pretty dreadful that day.
Up the mountain. Up there, visibility was close to zero and we were pretty wet.
Navigation new school.
Navigation old school. We took a break at this hut. But they didn’t have any rooms for us, since there was a TV show being recorded that day.
The old car and the pissing man.
This hut was private and occuppied.
Finally a few gaps in the clouds. Bernd is in the frame for scale.
Then we arrived at our last option: the Koathüttenalm. And to our surprise they had a space under the roof for us! Not only that, our two cow-farmer hosts were extremely nice and accommodating. They had a warm room, supplied us with food (although we said we brought our own), and were great company. We had a fantastic evening and really could hardly grasp our luck. Their names were Georg and Gisela and we thank them very much!
Happy and warm inside after an exhausting day.
Drying my boots.
The next morning. The weather looked much more promising.
We knew which mountain we wanted to climb. But there wasn’t really an official path there from where we started. But the locals assured us, we could just walk up the mountain in direction of the peak. So that’s what we did.
Up into the unknown.
Well deserved break.
We were thrilled when the plan worked out and we indeed reached the ridge. We then just had to deal with some changeable conditions.
The final steps.
More well deserved rest for our legs.
Auf dem großen Galtenberg.
Heading back down. Weather still very changeable. But no rain, fortunately.
I took along my old-school Voigtländer 6x9 camera, which is not always the easiest to handle and get a blur-free shot. But here, it worked out!
Cows were all around further down.
It could have been the perfect day with a perfect hike! But then we reached this point with a cow family blocking the way. I think we looked for other ways around this and debated for like 20 minutes or so, before we decided to carefully try going though there. In my case, that was a mistake…
Inspecting.
And that was the last photo I took that day. While Bernd stayed on the path, I decided to move onto the gras to the right, where I shortly after slipped and fell so unfortunate, that I broke my arm.
And then I was lying there for a while. I couldn’t really get up and walk, since my circulation wouldn’t allow that. After a while and with some additional help from local hunters that drove by, I managed though. And they gave us a lift back to the hut, which wasn’t actually all that far anymore.
Once there, I was supplied with water and schnaps until the mountain rescue team picked me up and drove me to a hospital.