Meine Wandergungen (My Wandering in Germany)
Before there were the Angels 2.0, there was the brilliant original version. As I’ve often said, I wasn’t a helicopter mom, I was a drone mom, hovering ever so near…
During his junior year at university, my son signed up for a three-month program in Germany to perfect his language skills.
We discussed it and agreed the better idea would be to take the full year abroad to completely immerse himself in the language and culture. (And that’s totally NOT what a drone mom would do, by the way…)
He stayed in a dorm and went to the UCSD program partner at University of Goettingen.
I visited him for about a week in February of that year. We spent a lot of time walking and and took a couple train rides to the Harz region, including Goslar, a historic town in Lower Saxony, Germany, known for its medieval old town and half-timbered houses. We took the Harzer Schmalspurbahnen, Germany’s famous narrow-gauge steam railway. (That’s another story.)
I brought back some of what that area is known for, a bewitching elixer called Harzgeist. It’s similar to Jagermeister, but more herby and spicy and incredibly delicious. I wish I had some now!
One day, my son said it would be fun to take a hike to visit a nearby castle. He assured me that it was about four hours round-trip, and I believed him because we could see the castle off in the distance.
Somehow we ended up walking through what looked to be a dense forest of mature pine trees. Were we lost? I’m still not sure. When we finally found our way back to the road, I looked up and saw, off in the distance, a sky full of ominous looking clouds.
“Hey, those look like snow clouds to me. How far are we from the castle?”
I asked the question because we had been walking non stop for a couple hours and we seemed to be no closer to the castle then when we first started out.
“It’s not far, let’s keep going.”
“Are you sure?”
With a sense of unease and foreboding, I had no choice but to follow his lead. Not only did I not know where I was, I couldn’t speak German at all, and my son was fluent.
A few minutes later, I insisted we stop and eat the lunch I had packed. I spotted a bench and we sat down.
I looked up and said, “I told you so” as the first giant snowflakes came down. It didn’t take long before the wind picked up and the fluffy snowflakes turned from a gentle dusting to a full on, blinding blizzard.
In just a few minutes, we were covered in snow. The bench was covered in snow, inches of the white stuff. I refused to walk any further to this non-existent mirage of a castle, and we headed back to Goettingen. We could barely see the road and I hesitatingly trusted my son that he knew where we were going.
I took a picture of us so we’d never forget, and every once in a while I’ll remind him of the time he should have listened to me when I told him there was an approaching storm.
By the way, that castle (can’t remember the name) was actually more than TWENTY MILES away, and there’s no way in the world we could have day hiked there. Later, my son laughingly told me he biked there and it was awesome…uh, thanks a LOT, Angel Boy!
