Our biking friends arrived for breakfast, he very chirpy and she a little tired. It sounded like a good day though for both of them. Yesterday there was a table between us but Irene must have noticed our friendship and now no longer a barrier. Our host busied herself around the four of us making more coffee, joking and we joined in needing little encouragement.

I don’t know if I told you, but Corrie and I once contemplated walking the Dream Path from Munich to Venice over 30 days, but once I was diagnosed with AF, it has kept me below a thousand metres and many along the way are over three thousand. So we thought we would at least get a taste of it so we had a test run today. It is day 4 of the walk and we’ve left out any other walking to concentrate on just the mountain, taking time and stopping if any signs of AF. It will be under 1000 which has worked for me.

We still did not know how to access this path until today and even the info people were not too sure. We were fortunate that a man in his sixties walked in full of trekking knowledge who filled in a lot of gaps for us. Later we were looking at our map and another sixties man stopped and asked if he could help. He answered the questions we failed to ask the other like where’s the Backerei.

Finally we were away or so we thought. Because our English friends have a motorbike and we read signposts, when we saw a biker in his sixties reading a sign we joined him. I asked him if he spoke Australian and he did. A quiet man, he talked softly about his Harley, and we chatted about our friends and their love for biking. The small talk over, we said we were going to try and climb this mountain which he comes down from Munich to climb every year. I said could I take a photo and I didn’t ask but forgot, why he wanted me to wait for him to start his bike before the photo.

So on a humid, hot day we climbed two hundred metres, and going well, then stopped before we needed to. It was a bit like having a good amount of water before we were thirsty. Behind us was a tall hang glider and his book reading girlfriend sharing sixty years between them. She does this while he tries to kill himself, it takes her mind off the risk. He told us many of the dangers like an unexpected wind before he took off and about the emergency parachute that only slows you down if you open it high in the air, otherwise it’s too late.

We chatted for a while and were thrilled that in the last hour we had learnt enough about the dream path to sound like experts. Time was getting on and I was thinking about really taking care of myself up this mountain and we’d already walked too far for the climb to work, so down we went and walked along the Isar river for sometime and enjoyed a small dog/big dog, make believe dog fight. They both had dads so was ok. The Isar had spread out to three semi trailer widths with a width of those white stones enjoying one third of the river but in patches. 

On the train and on the way home were two girls in their twenties and two fairly young dogs. I had my camera on the ready and while my psychic wound is around rejection I asked them if I could take a photo of their dogs. One reluctantly said yes, maybe she struggled with rejection also, so I then put my phone on video (not much difference I thought) but not for too long.