Bulgaria Trip Part I: Rila Mountains

Bulgaria Summer Trip: Part I

Acting somewhat on impulse, we identified Bulgaria as one of those "formerly forbidden, now open and available, and therefore interesting" places. Jay's solo work trip down here in May 18 confirmed it so we took the show on the road to check out this former Soviet-dominated republic.

First stop was in the Rila Mountains south of the capital of Sofia where we lucked into a beautiful day for an outstanding hike around a series of seven alpine lakes. A route about 6 miles in length, the kids managed it without problems. Well mostly. We were caught in a sudden rainstorm near the top of the hike, but pushed onward to bag the seventh lake, even though this meant leaving Jasper behind to hide under a rock in his t-shirt and shorts (he was also freaked out by the thunder). Cody followed along but kept muttering, exasperated, to himself "What the heck, parents can't just leave behind their kids!"

In the end everyone survived, there was no hypothermia, and we enjoyed one of the scenic highlights of the country. It was so amazing to have a big hike like this, since there are no mountains like this near Berlin of course. So the trip was off to a great start.

Chairlift to the ridgeline start of the hike.

Adding to the hiking cairns near the top of the ridgeline. Beautiful flat meadow stretched out everywhere beyond.

The meadows up here were soft, expansive, and filled with wildflowers.

At some point we starting documenting the lakes by holding up fingers to correspond to which lake number we stood at.

Cody's red sweatpants, which should have been retired awhile ago, have brushed rocks, street cobbles and jungle gyms all over this continent.

Jay resurrected his LL Bean 1990-issue Anorak for this trip. It worked on me as a college student travelling thru Europe then, and it still works now! And in TEAL.

Downtown Sapareva Banya, sulfur-smelling hot springs in the downtown park. Sulphur eats down the concrete so they have to rebuild the fountain every few years.

Lots of projects get started here that never get finished. This looks like a big hotel complex just off the central park which now serves as a grazing compound for some local horses.

Bulgarian script is Cyrillic, similar to Russian. It has 30 characters and was developed around 1000 AD. It is deliciously foreign-looking and mysterious!

3 year anni

Bayerischer Platz: where the Berlin adventure started on June 23, 2015. We go back every year to mark the occasion.

Tidbits from May/June

We realized that we are posting much less now than we used to and want to up our game again. It's not like life suddenly became boring, it is just that we are getting lazy.

So here are some things from the summer of 2018 that are worth sharing.

Jay's 48th Birthday.  

"Sternfahrt" (Star Trip) when they close the Autobahn to cars so the bicycles can take over. 20km for the kids that day!

More biking: Easy to take the train out to the countryside and pedal around the small towns and churches. This is becoming a treasured weekend family activity.

Taking the train back from a visit to Copenhagen to see Cassandra's cousin. The train then went on the ferry boat, which was super cool.

Dieffenbachstrasse, one of my favorite blocks on my bike commute to work. It had never occurred to me that you could fall in love with specific city streets but this one with its bakeries, cafes and old buildings behind shady oak trees really took me.

Poppy and Nanny visited for the month of May. Lots of adventures in store.

At the Leipzig Zoo. Leipzig is a very cool town an hour south of Berlin on the high speed train. 

Old factory area, Leipzig outskirts. Teaching the kids the excitement of urban exploring!

Leipzig tower lookout.

When you don't have a car and need to get the garden project materials back home from the store..

Gatow Airfield. One of the Berlin Airlift airports, now a flight museum. Air museums here are just like in the US except here you get to see all the Soviet stuff. This is a Russian Hind-D attack chopper.

Camping with school friends on a lake in Brandenburg and the famous "Stick Bread." 

Jay does another urban exploration, this time to a former Soviet flight school at Jüterbog south of town. Super eerie.

World Cup starts!! The kids decorate daddy. 

Watching Germany at the Cafe am Neuen See biergarten, one of the classic spots in the old West Berlin.

Dinner at a Peruvian restaurant with school bud Rohan before a Friday night sleepover. Kids are glued to TV World Cup game Iceland v Nigeria. Jasper looks possessed, which is a little troubling.

Jay and his Finnish riding partner Jani complete a "Brevet," which in French means "Excruciatingly Long Bike Ride Just Because." We did a 210km (130miles) loop through the Brandenburg countryside. Picture taken at the famous Spy Bridge in Potsdam where they exchanged Gary Powers after the U2 incident.

Kid's Concert at the snazzy German Konzert Haus with The Berlin Symphony Orchestra. This, unbelievably, is a typical Sunday afternoon activity around here.

Camping in Germany

Last weekend we took the regional train an hour north of town to a place called Fürstenberg/Havel to join some friends on a camping trip. You'd call it car camping if we had a car, this was no backpacker excursion. The spot was Ellbogensee. Some impressions from Cassandra:

When you pull up to a campsite in the Pacific NW, you know you’re at a spot when you see a number marker, a picnic table and a fire pit. That’s it. Easy. Precise. Clear. As a family, you may drive around the loop(s) of the campground to find the site that’s: flattest, shady, close to the river/lake, away from the trash, near the bathroom, near a water spigot or other amenities (or away from them!). You go back to the main registration booth or camp host’s tent/RV and register yourselves, get a slip to put on the post confirming you have paid, etc. And, then you settle in and set up your tent, put out your table cloth, stash your $5 bundle of wood next to the fire ring and get out your lounge chairs. And, then – only then, do you go off and explore the sites the campground has to offer.

Right?

Well, in Germany it’s slightly different. There are no number markers, no fire rings, no picnic tables and no paying the camp host. You must bring your own table / chairs. There are no fires allowed, except in centrally designed locations on tiny charcoal BBQs the campground management loans out. Every family/group has a picnic blanket in various shades of plaid that serves as your main gathering spot (for meals, sunbathing, playing games, taking a nap, etc.). Some of the more prepared folks have little folding tables or use the top of their plastic camp box for a table.

There is a place to wash dishes with hot water and showers (50 cents for 4 mins, but if you’re done early, please turn off the water), clean bathrooms and an amazing natural playground hiding among the trees.

The place we visited this past weekend had the added bonus of an amazing Vegetarian Café and shop with basic supplies (all organic!), beer, ice cream and a bakery that takes Sunday bread orders. Bread is such a staple in Germany that families pre-order their rolls, or croissants the night before to have at 8am when the bakery opens. I ordered 6 different just to make sure we got a good sampling. Yum!

The lake was very natural with just two slim docks intended to moor small sail boats and whatnot – not for diving off of or playing. Reeds creeped to the edges of the swim area providing a barrier against float away kick-boards and other floaty toys. The sandy beach was littered with an assortment of sand toys (none broken!) and little kids (naked for the most part) splashed in and out of the water with their parents quietly resting on their picnic blanket several meters away.

Once we set up our tent and got oriented, we doled out water squirters to the kids and they alternated between little battles, riding the campground go-karts up and down the sandy road between campsites and playing soccer in the same pathway. We ventured to the natural playground on Saturday afternoon and rented a canoe for an hour-long paddle across the lake, but when given the option to just play water squirters, soccer or go-karts on Sunday they opted for the latter.

Around 7:30pm Saturday we got the charcoal going and cooked 24+ mini brats, green peppers, Haloumi cheese. And, we mixed up a batch of dough for the kids to cook over the fire wrapped around a 2” thick stick (Stockbrot!). Then, I broke out the bag of marshmallows I’d grabbed at Trader Joes on a recent trip to the USA.

All in all, it was a great trip. We must make Stockbrot again. 

After losing a watergun battle with the Kinder.

Cass prepares the bread dough for the sticks.

Campfire cooking our stick-bread.

In the background other kids practice the latest rage among pre-teen dancers: the "Floss". Foreground is Bela, one of Cody's best buddies from the Kita.

Eventually you get yummy stick-bread! Super novel.

Cody pulls Bela around in the "use when they are free" campground pedal karts.

Watergun refill station.

Waiting for the return train at Fürstenberg.

On the Sunday return trip our train was packed. In spite of this, we had seats until Oranienburg when we had to switch to the S-Bahn network. Our train was turning around and going back north to the Baltic sea coast town of Rostock.

This was a stressful change of trains since you have no reserved seats and piles of people competing with you. We were also dragging our camping stuff in packs and duffels. We all disgorged onto the train platform and immediately tremendous thunder clapped all around us and the rain starting falling in sheets. The station was being renovated and there was only one exit off the unroofed platform: down the stairs and through a tunnel under the tracks to the S-Bahn line on the other side. A stream of people were coming from there, squeezing through the narrow chute to get to the north bound train. Additionally, tons of people brought their bicycles which clog up everything when lots of people are trying to get though a small space.

So, we stood on the platform inching forward with hundreds of others as the rain soaked us down and dogs yelped with the crashes of the thunder.

Eventually we go to the S-Bahn train and found a car that still had a four seater section in it where we could all cram our stuff and we rode that back home. Potentially there is a lesson here: the Southbound trains coming back into the city on Sundays might be more crowded that the Northbound ones. The ones coming from the south after a weekend never seem as packed as this. Maybe we just keep the exploring to the south of the city next time!

Sternfahrt Ride

Starting at Wannsea Station

Last weekend we joined around 90K other bicyclists and took to the roads around the city in the world's largest bike-rights demonstration. They close off many of the major roads through town, and even the Autobahn in places, to let cyclists take over for a few hours. The word "Sternfahrt" means Star Ride. The network of roads that were closed resemble a giant star overlaid on the map of Berlin.

We took the regional train out to Wannsea, a popular forest and lake destination halfway between Berlin and Potsdam, and rode back into town on the Autobahn. The kids managed 20 km (12 miles) - Jasper did even more as he and I went all the way back to the flat so he logged 15 miles. Cass and Cody took the train home at the end of the ride (long story).

I am continually befuddled by the political will here that lets these sorts of things happen. In a place whose bike lanes, driver awareness and bike adoption is already way ahead of many countries, they still go a step further and close down major highways and cross town arteries just so the cyclists can cruise around enjoying themselves.

As an American it felt slightly strange "demonstrating" for more bike rights since compared to the US, cyclists here really have NOTHING to complain about. When we mention this to Germans, they are incredulous that we think the work of assuring cyclist rights could ever be close to finished. But, this is why the systems are in place here that facilitate such a strong bike culture.

They for some reason have the will and the means to match up the public transport infrastructure that incorporates bikes, trains, busses, and green space in a way I cannot imagine happening in the States outside of tiny pockets where the stars are already perfectly aligned. It probably has to do with the onset of the car culture in the US in the 50's which spelled the end of the existing public transport infrastructure between and within cities.

Different places have different societal variables and motivations of those calling the shots of course, so the answer lies in those types of details.

But since this is how it works here, we decided to go all in and join the event and enjoy the ride!

Wannsea sits on the path of the old Berlin Wall, quite close to the "Spy Bridge" (Glienicker Brücke) where they exchanged Francis Gary Powers for a Russian agent.

Here is the Autobahn entrance ramp.

Biking on the Autobahn! Yea

I like to think our kids will remember things like this, since life doesn't constantly serve you up such opportunities on the regular basis that you get them here. But who knows what they will recall from these days.

Here is a video of the kids and their buds riding along the Autobahn. Click the image below for it:

And now we are back in town, where the roads are all still closed for us. Cass gives Cody a boost.

This was a few minutes before Cody crashed into Cassandra and took both of them down. Cody's front tire got bent. Skinned knees aside, we unfortunately were robbed of the opportunity to circle the massive Siegesäule monument at the ride's Finale as a family.  Next year! 

Jasper at the Queen Charlotte gates on the west side of Berlin.

Circling the monument at the end of the ride with our school friends.

Riding back through town afterwards and stopping outside the Schleusen Krug biergarten for a water break. So proud of this guy!