Yesterday, I paid Duck Memorial another visit: :-D
It was a really nice hike, there was hardly anybody outside. The weather wasn’t bad at all, around 22°C and cloudy most of the time. The drizzle got me a few times, but it wasn’t terrible. It just raised the humidity. A bit more wind would have been nice, it was very calm, even at the summits.
On the way there I had to kill a tick that I found on my trousers. Those bloody suckers! What benefit do they bring nature? At home I checked and couldn’t find any others. Phew.
On the way back from Mt. Hohenrechberg I saw a deer and hare. It’s been years that I came across hares in the wild, so that was really cool. I decided to watch the sunset from Mt. Hohenstaufen, so I took a small detour. Absolutely worth it:
A group of hippies eventually joined me at the sunset lookout, lit joss sticks, played some weird music on a metal pipe thingy (a bit like a single windbell) and sang a sun dance song. Said song had gone missing for a very long time and was recovered only lately, they told me. Okay. Some other really crazy dude told us that the mountain we’re on had been raised in the Young Stone Age. That period where harvests were plentiful and people had a lot of spare time. WTF!? I mean they all were super nice and friendly and talking to them was also actually lovely, but what… err… interesting mindsets.
On the final return I saw another three deer on a paddock. And now for the very, very best part of the whole trip: in the forest I encountered 83 fireflies before I stopped counting. In the end it must have been 500-600 in total. One even nearly hit me in the face if I hadn’t ducked at the last second. :-) Man, this was soooo fricking amazing! Fireflies for round about 1.5km! Didn’t even try to take photos in this darkness, though.