Adventures of Wes and Laura

Search for the cranes of the Oder Valley

The days are shortening quickly, and they soon after we lose the advantage of daylight savings time we will really be missing the long days we’ve been exploiting on our weekend trips. So we went took yet another regional train-bike trip this Sunday, this time to the Oder National Park on the border with Poland.

Back in Gainesville we are big fans of the sandhill cranes that winter in big numbers in central Florida, and make use of a big university field in the morning that we used to drive by every day. Their loud chortling (the best I can describe it) can be heard a mile away and they are long-legged but graceful birds. Well in the Oder National Park 1,000 of cranes are preparing to fly either to souther Spain or Northern Africa for the winter, so we went to check them out. We invited Maria, an American collegue of mine at Ecologic, to come along with us because she was dying to get out of Berlin and visit a park. We biked a long way along the main channel of the river and along canals and locks, as there are a lot of control structures because its heavily used for shipping, and had beautiful views of the open landscape, marsh, and old German towns. We only ended up seeing a dozen cranes fly over us on their way to their night spot in Poland but we had an excellent trip.

Saturday night we went to a club in the Oranienburger Tor district to see a French rock band with some friends from Laura’s work. We had a great time – though they were French all their lyrics were in English and the experience of the concert made me feel more like I was back in the US (it was just like some shows I used to go to in Washington DC) than any other time since we’ve been here .

Thursday we have an appointment with the foreign office to get visas that will allow us to stay through December, as right now our status only gives us until November 24. Wish us luck or else we’ll be forced to return early.

posted by Wes and Laura @ 10/09/2006 02:53:00 PM