Hiking in the Bastei

What a great day!! This may just have been the funnest (is that actually a word, or is it the most fun?) day that we've had with Jonathan. We laughed hysterically nearly the entire day, hiked some great trails, saw incredible things, and weren't ready to come home when it was time. Seriously. I had to literally pry your son/brother/grandson/nephew/friend/relative/pizza-finisher from the rocks in order for us to make the train home. Jonathan is a hiking maniac, and told us in no uncertain terms that he intends to come back and continue hiking through Swiss Saxony (die Sächsische Schweiz). By the time we made it back to the train, we had been hiking for nearly 5 hours. Jonathan begged for more trails, but we had to go home. I felt bad disappointing him like that, but I made up for it at dinner time.

Kira unfortunately didn't go hiking with us. She had packed only flats on her trip through Germany, and we knew well enough that flats in the woods, climbing through holes in the rock and running through mud, just weren't going to work. She spent the day with our friend, Elan, while the Boy, Mister and I conquered the Bastei. We packed a lunch with sandwiches, lots of fruit, and an enormous bottle of water, and set off. We rode on another of Jonathan's favorite double decker trains (but now they're not really that cool anymore, because he's now an old hat at riding them...) We walked up one side of the Bastei, through the woods, walked through the bridge in the middle of the sky (that's what it looks like from the ground), and had a blast. We took another route back down to the train through an area called the Schwedische Höhlen (the Swedish Holes), holes carved into the rock that protected the inhabitants of the Bastei from a Viking raid in the 12 or 1400s (sorry for the vagueness. I just can't remember which it was). I'll let Jonathan and the pictures tell you the rest.

Pizza finisher says: So Erica, Andreas, and yours truly went hiking through some insanely awesome rock formations. At first we were just hiking in the woods for about half an hour. We were over six hundred feet above the Elbe river, I know that doesn't sound like a lot but it feels like a thousand when you're looking straight down. There was a place where there used to be a fort over some of the rocks and they have bridges to connect each building to the other. The fort is gone but they made new bridges. The bridges are made of metal bars so you can see right through it. Erica was freaked out with it because when you looked down you could see about 200 feet down.

The highest point was so high it was insane. When we were going down we saw some man made holes carved into the rocks. They were made so the people of the reigon could hide from the vikings. We were there for almost five hours. After the hike we had ice cream.

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