A Firm Foundation

I started this blog last summer in Dresden. Alone in a café with excellent WiFi and desperate to share the beautiful landscape of Saxony-Switzerland with my family and friends at home. Rather than sending them the pictures all individually I thought it might make sense to upload them and then simply share the link. I used to do this with a password protected Tumblr blog but I’d forgotten the password and this seemed more mature anyway. In the beginning, I had no text, just pictures. I struggle to find the right words at times and just finding the right titles for the posts sometimes takes me ages. When I named my blog „eifach mal uf und devo“ it was because I had decided to go visit Saxony Switzerland on my own in a spur of the moment and „simply up and away“ seemed like a good title to represent how I felt.

Now, over a year later, the same urge to just leave no matter whether I was on my own or with friends overcame me. I decided to go hiking in Alpstein. It seemed like an excellent idea when I booked my room for the night. It was only two days / one night after all. I wouldn’t leave Switzerland and surely it couldn’t be that dangerous. Soon, this feeling of excitement turned into fear though. I remembered Saxony-Switzerland where on my way home from the Bastei I had to walk three kilometres through a pitch-black forest and my feet hurt so bad I thought I would die. While I think near-death experiences are quite good to put things in perspective, they aren’t fun. And I certainly didn’t want to go through one alone in the mountains.

I went to church in the morning as usual and had lunch at Silke and Joel’s. I had my hiking shoes and my backpack with me but I was still unsure whether or not this was a good idea. I saw on the weather radar that the sky would clear up around the time I would arrive at the cable car. With Silke’s encouragement, I decided to go.

It didn’t clear up when I arrived though. I had promised that I would turn around if it looked like it would rain. It was drizzling and for a moment I thought I would have to get back on the cable car again. I didn’t though. Somehow I had to prove myself that I could do this and I was confident that it would be worth it. Thick fog crawled up the mountain side and hid the peaks from my view. Step by step I made my way up the mountain. Luckily, it wasn’t a difficult trail. And one of the advantages of hiking alone is definitely taking as many breaks as you want. Occasionally the fog would clear up for a few minutes and I’d immediately tear my camera out of my backpack and take a billion pictures. Kim would’ve gone mad had she been there 🙂 Somehow it was very calm and made me quite happy though. Sitting on a rock, surrounded by fog, eating an Ovomatine bar and not having to rush anywhere. I made it to the Hotel eventually and during dinner, the sky outside cleared up and the sun came out. There was still fog in the valley and it looked amazing. This was followed by a stunning sunset.

The next morning I got up at five thirty and decided to wait for sunrise. The sky was already an orange gradient and I felt incredibly blessed to see the mountain peaks turn red all around me.

And that’s basically it. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky that day and really hot. I finally saw the Aescher-Wildkirchli but it was less spectacular than I expected. That and there were so many tourists compared to the absolute solitude the day before. It was weird.

Anyway, enough talking. Here are the pictures 🙂