Departure

In Germany, it has been wintery cold, icy, and white since the beginning of the year. It's hard to imagine that in southern Europe, spring is already blooming and in the far north, there are barely two hours of daylight today! Experiencing these vast distances, differences, individual expressions, and beauties truly at a slow pace is just right...

...but now briefly about myself (in case there are people visiting this page who don't know me...): My name is Dorothea (and Anna - hence 'Wildgans-Anna', as I dreamed as a child of flying to other countries with the wild geese like Nils Holgersson, and to this day, migratory birds awaken a longing for travel and the 'yearning that never rests'...) I am a wanderer, a pilgrim, a sleeper under the starry sky, a discoverer with my feet; over thirty years ago, as a student, I already walked to Santiago de Compostela and Finisterre (when hardly anyone knew where that was...). Until I was 19, a wall and an 'iron curtain' limited the opportunities to wander eastward, and thankfully, this changed, and the walkable Europe 'became larger.'

In the past decades, I was lucky to live intensely with family - with children (own and foster), animals, a garden, and eventually long-term caregiving. We also hiked and sang as a family with a dog and, if necessary, diapers in the backpack: in the Alpine region, in Scandinavia, on the Balkan, and of course again and again in Germany...

For a few years now, I have been widowed, the children have grown up and are going their own ways, and the house and garden can be enjoyed by a new young family - and I am hiking again mostly alone: For example, across the Alps from Austria to Slovenia, cycling through France, or on an 'endless beach walk' along the Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian Baltic coast. A surprising gift of life: From time to time, a 'new' dear hiking companion joins me - such through Romania on the Via Transilvanica or in Poland and the Czech Republic, in the 'forest solitudes' of Eichendorff in old Silesia...

And now? I am 55 years old, my life so far has been rich, dynamic, not always easy, but certainly never boring - I look back with full gratitude! 'Shining days: do not cry that they are over, but rejoice that they were.' Confucius is said to have said that, and I take it to heart anew again and again. After selling the house and car, sorting and passing on so much, storing all the things I still want to keep, the (hopefully for a long time) last visit to the dentist, the (hopefully not!) 'last' visits to many loved ones... now the backpack is packed for a departure, a letting go + going forward without a fixed end time! 'I will walk through Europe on foot,' I answer as casually as possible when asked what I plan to do next year, in the coming years - although it feels anything but casual:

When I was able to walk almost 1500 km along the Baltic coast in summer 2024, I was very much aware that these wonderful coasts had been the outer border of the Soviet Union for decades and thus a restricted area that no one was allowed to enter! What freedom it is that today a life of lonely, naked bathing, sleeping on the beach, enjoying waves, wind, and vastness is possible here! Only a few years ago, we all witnessed how frighteningly quickly the situation of a 'borderless' Europe changed! Thus, my hike is a jubilant gratitude for the luck of being able to walk through a Europe without walls and barriers - and at the same time a constant awareness of the threat to this freedom!