East Munich woodlands and old quarry in Waldperlach.

The woodland is within Munich city - a haven for wildlife and diverse species of trees and plants.  

The energy of woodlands is unique. Transforming. There are signs of industry - a disused quarry, paths, machines, felled trees - their trunks sprayed with numbers & ready for collection.

But nature is returning, as it will and I was reminded of Wordsworth's poem The Ruined Cottage - how nature reclaims - as the trees have, all around and in the disused quarry. I recorded the music on my Lowden guitar and is one of my versions of Shebeg Shemore originally composed by the great Irish harpist Turlough O'Carolan- shorter version to fit the video!

The numbers are staggering: 2018 will see 6.3 million visitors at Munich's Oktoberfest.

One of the best attractions of the Oktoberfest is the Oide Wiesn, an enclosed area with an entry fee of 3 Euros.  Here it is a far less hectic experience and a chance to eat in one of the restaurants - the famous one being the Festzelt Bavarian beer tent. Yes it seats 5,000 - and has a dance floor- if you fancy grooving along to the famous Wolfgang Grünbauer and his orchestra.

The Oide Wiesn (Bavarian for The Old Wiesn or Oktoberfest) is full of memorabilia: Old cycles, motorbikes, parts of fun fair rides, tractors dating from the 1930s, a section of an old Wall of Death (with motorbike), and the traditional bands playing music as it would have sounded decades ago.

The Mangfall River is 63km long. It flows out of Lake Tegernsee into the River Inn, a major tributary of The Danube. The so-called Mangfall Knieweg, a trekking route starting from the village of Valley, is about 11km. The sudden appearance of a dozen or so camels caught us by surprise.

From Munich to the village of Aying on a cycle ride through time ... Bavaria with its massive web of cycle pathways is a cyclist's heaven! 
Ancient forests
Sleepy villages
Maypoles and onion domed churches
A war memorial 
Old farmhouses against the backdrop of the timeless Alps. 

Glad there's so much to discover!
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Hiking in the Chiemsee Alps in southern Germany is an experience to repeat. We chose the Klausenbachklamm, a 10km route through forests, across Alpine pastures and meadows, and along the Klausenbach Gorge.

A visit to the starting point village Reit im WInkl is a great day out in itself.  Close to the Austrian border it was once a customs village in pre-Shengen days. It is called a 'snow-magnet' for the predictable amounts of snow that create one of the best Alpine ski resorts of southern Germany. In contrast it has one of the highest counts of sunny days in Bavaria - and the day we arrived was no exception - as the pictures show!

A bakery called Neumaier's (now in the fourth generation of the same family) was our early morning start for coffee and sweet bread. And on our return a superb restaurant called. Die Milchbar provided traditional Bavarian food (final picture above)
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Link to The Fuggerei, Augsburg (The oldest social housing complex still in use)

https://www.vernonlacey.com/blog/archives/08-2018

Valldemossa is a small village in the Sierra de Tramuntana mountain range in north Mallorca. It is over 400 meters above sea level and has a small population of around two thousand.

The approach to the village is a road that rises above the plane of La Palma, and takes you through the renowned forests of the north, replete with oaks, olives, and cypress trees.  As  we ascended the mountain road I could see the urban spread of the capital expanding in the rearview mirror, soon to be blocked from view when the forest thickened and the road veered off in a new direction. For a short time the drama of the scenery and the feeling of travelling into another Mallorca imposed upon me, and I was full of curiosity about Valldemossa, made famous by George Sands's description of living here in the winter of 1838-39 with her lover Frédéric Chopin.

Arriving early in the evening brought immediate advantage and the empty coach bays and abundance of parking places indicated most tourists had left. Waitresses and waiters were clearing up, shops were shuttered for the commercial hiatus, and here and there locals sat around, leaning back on chairs under a café awning, or in the dappled shade of an acacia tree, all interweaving their rhythmic Mallorquin native tongue in flowing conversations.

We headed straight for the private museum where Sands and Chopin lived, a former Carthusian monastery whose sparse and solemn cells were rented out as long ago as the mid-nineteenth century. 

A cashier provided a brief overview of what to look out for. Is the piano Chopin's original piano? I asked.  'Si. Si, she replied, 'Siempre ha estado en Mallorca.'  The piano is the original. It has always been on Mallorca.  

The museum was a delight. A soft summer breeze brushed along the vaulted corridors, and when we came across Chopin and Sand's room I was delighted to see his Pleyel piano, placed near the window. Chopin had the piano brought from Paris, and on it he would compose for Sands in the evenings. I looked out of the window on an ornamental terraced garden. Beyond the garden wall the evening sun made the cypress trees on the mountain sides shimmer bluish, and on behind the valley the sea glimmered silver-grey. It is an exquisite place, and I imagined Chopin sat her all those years ago. The picture above is taken from the very window.

Chopin had about ten more years of life left when he came to Mallorca from Paris. He had hoped that the milder clime would ease his ailing health. It did not, and in the next decade his health only got worse. Was it TB? Most likely say many experts. His body was interred in Paris, but his heart was sent to Poland at Chopin's request where it rests in the Holy Cross Church in Warsaw.  Its journey there, smuggled by his loving sister past Russian guards, Poland then being under occupation, is the beginning of Chopin's transformation into virtual national saint and icon of Polish nationalism. All through the visit I could hear Chopin's music in my mind's ear. The nocturnes - whose soft melodies float across the brooding, elemental power beneath. The 'cannon buried in the flowers' as the contemporary Schumann said of Chopin.

We left the museum an hour later and wound our way down the narrow thoroughfares of the ancient village. Local kids played in one street, and in another a procession of musicians went by with the sound of bagpipes and drums filling the air,  all following a bride and groom who made their way under a shower of confetti, scattered by the host that surrounded them.  

Here is the house of Santa Catalina Thomas read a notice outside one modest abode, a tiny terraced house in the middle of the street. She was born on May 1531, and canonized in the twentieth century.  Decorated tiles done in the azulejos style adorn doorways all over the village in honour of the famous peasant girl who left Valldemossa to live as a nun in the capital, Palma de Mallorca.

The rustic stone buildings and cobbled streets suddenly became a corridor of time, and Valldemossa was transformed, its modernity gone and the layers of history whispering.  Here was the house of a local peasant girl who had lived in medieval austerity, far from my own world. I walked to the end of the street, vaguely wondering where the connection was between its late medieval residents and the village of the twenty first century.

At the end of the street an old man was pointing at a broken sandstone paver on a doorstep. Who was the young man he was talking to? Was it his son? His comments had the familiarity of family.  'I don't want to go and buy another one,' the old man said. 'Make sure you cut the new one right. And don't break any others when you lift the old one.'

I slowed down, delighted I had come across local Valldemossa.  Two generations. A block of stone. A simple repair.