Not long ago Katrin, Lloyd and I went for a hike through the Sächsische Schweiz (Saxon Switzerland) near Rathen. It was Lloyd’s first venture into one of Germany’s most beautiful natural environments, only half an hour from Dresden. For the occasion we bought a baby backpack to replace the lighter baby harness which had served us so dependably during our two months in Cincy. Lloyd is bigger now, and though his increased weight wouldn’t prevent me from lugging him around in the front-loading harness, his longer, stronger legs do. Even toward the end of our time in the US, my infant son’s legs had reached the unfortunate length at which any random backwards kick could ensure his status as an only child. I’d rather risk his feet bruising a kidney or displacing a vertebrae behind me than have a playful though precise strike to the front leave me a permanently cross-eyed alto.

Despite our half-hearted effort to get an early start that Sunday morning, we didn’t arrive at the small town of Rathen on the Elbe River until shortly after one. Rathen is a popular destination for regional tourists, and it’s no wonder; the composition of rustic country houses against the backdrop of tree-covered hills and Dr. Seuss-like sandstone spires is the Old World archetype, so authentic you expect it to be fake. With Lloyd sitting harmlessly in his backpack perch, we wove our way through the masses of Germans, Czechs and Poles clogging the streets, past the gingerbread houses and on to higher ground.

The route we’d selected from a trail guide seemed simple enough: a relatively circular track leading us through a diverse landscape of mixed forest, fields and cartoonish rock pillars. The inclines weren’t too steep, and the trail guide estimated the entire tour at 14 kilometers, 4.5 hours - longer than we wanted but still leaving just enough time to get Lloyd home, fed and in bed on schedule. And besides, those guides always grossly overestimate hiking times, factoring in old people, families with dawdling children and those for whom flip-flops are a lifestyle choice. Our first highlight along the way was the Bastei, a concentration of particularly impressive sandstone outcrops high above the Elbe River and one of the most popular areas of the entire national park. We reached it only an hour into our hike and stopped to feed Lloyd, who seemed to be enjoying his new vantage point. Katrin and I weren’t as fortunate; sightseers of both the bipedal and bus-delivered variety were blocking the best views so that I often resorted to holding my camera high in the air and then bringing it down to show me what it had seen. This soon grew old, and it seemed best to move beyond the reach of buses and primitive thong sandals.

Just down the road a small old man was entertaining tourists with his street organ. I wanted to get a short video of this. As I directed the camcorder at him, he stopped, folded his arms across his chest and frowned like a little boy refusing to play ball unless he gets to be shortstop. “No video!” he huffed. I didn’t understand. He was performing publicly in the middle of a scenic national park, standing before one of the most photographed landscapes in the country, and pictures weren’t allowed? “Why not?” I asked. “Yeah, why not?” he replied, hands out to his side as if I already knew the answer, if I just listened to my heart. “Yeah, why not?” I said again. “Yeah, why not?” he said. You get the idea. This monkey-see-monkey-do exchange led me to suspect the real organ grinder was on break, and I was dealing with his stroppy Capuchin assistant. Not wanting to further embarrass myself talking to the wildlife, I stashed the camera and walked past the diminutive creature. “I would have paid you for it,” I said, pointing to his upturned hat lying in the dirt. “You can keep it!” he said, refusing to budge until I was safely out of sight. “Good, I will,” I snapped back. And now I hate organ grinders; I never saw that one coming.

After another hour, we came to the Steinerner Tisch (stone table), a small, square, stone table framed by four stone benches. It was built at the beginning of the 18^th century for a hunting feast and apparently has remained in situ since. Katrin and I sat down at the ancient table and spread out a small feast of our own: turkey and cheese sandwiches with a side of carrots and apples; we’d forgotten the mead. Lloyd, exhausted from all the climbing, dozed next to us in his pack as we ate and relaxed. While gnawing on a carrot I heard footsteps close behind me. An elderly couple was standing there looking past us at the table, which was hidden from view beneath crumpled tin foil, napkins and daypacks. “Guten Tag,” I offered them. “Guten Tag,” they replied, the man holding his dejected gaze on the table. “Well, at least it’s still being used,” the woman commented. Then I saw a camera hanging from the old man’s neck. I imagined them hiking uphill all this distance at 0.27 miles per hour just to get one clean picture of something even older than them. What was the significance of the table to them? I wondered. Did they meet here so long ago? Was it the site of their first picnic together? Or maybe they were unwrapping more than just sandwiches on its rough surface, her bare apple bottom where my Granny Smith now sat.

Ew.

Quickly we cleared away the clutter so they could get a few shots. They thanked us and left.

A look at the map told me we were running a bit behind schedule. Lloyd was still sleeping though, so we debated whether or not to cut a few kilometers out of the trip. Katrin thought it a good idea, but my inner Braveheart said we should press on; Murron would have wanted it that way. When Lloyd woke up I hoisted him heroically onto my back and we continued uphill.

My years of military and backpacking experience have taught me this: No matter how detailed your map, there will always come that crucial moment when this power line or that dry riverbed does not coincide with what you’re reading, and your most seasoned educated guess leaves you with the sinking feeling that you should have turned left at Albuquerque several miles back.

Katrin and I stood in a parking lot that I swear didn’t exist on the map. That is until a kindly bus driver made it materialize, with God as my witness. Somehow I’d managed to confuse an interstate road for a bike trail and led the three of us in the only direction one will go when relying on chance and instinct to guide him: the other way. Time was running out on us, and if we were even within five-kilometers of my best guess, we were still hours away from our starting point and wouldn’t get Lloyd back home before he rightfully experienced a meltdown. Luckily for us I am not a proud man, not even mildly self-respecting. With the map waving at the end of my flailing arm I chased down the first human I spotted, the bus driver who drove the route between where we were and - true story - where we wanted to be. After conjuring up our location on the map before my disbelieving eyes, he offered to drive us back on his magic carpet bus. Yes, for free.

As we bounced along down the road with the good fairy bus driver, I felt a little embarrassed at having to be rescued from what amounted to nothing more than a routine Sunday stroll through the woods. Still, we’d had a good time, especially Lloyd, who didn’t complain once or panic when things started getting sketchy; a natural outdoorsman he’ll turn out to be. The bus door opened, and we got out where we’d started so many hours ago, wiser for the experience. Take trail length estimates seriously. Never trust a tourist map.

And never tip the organ grinder.

That was fun! Let’s do it again!

Unless you’re talking about prison sentences or waits at the emergency room, two months is generally considered a long time. Yet as I sit here at our desk in our apartment in Dresden, Germany, the last two months we spent in Cincinnati, Ohio passed like a waking dream: Did that just happen or was it all in my head? It certainly happened; or is it possible to gain ten pounds while day dreaming about goetta, Skyline and Christian Moerlein?

I have almost 2,000 pictures to sort through. Please bear with me.

Today we’re leaving Germany to visit my family in Cincinnati for two months. With Lloyd growing so fast, we want his American relatives to see him before he’s taller than them. When we woke up this morning, I thought I’d get everyone in the mood for our trip by singing a rousing morning-voice rendition of America the Beautiful, or at least as much as I could remember. The following is a true story:

ME: Oh beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain…

KATRIN: Oh no!

ME: For purple mountain majesty [raising voice 0.7 octaves] above the fruited plains…

KATRIN: Stop! That’s terrible!

ME [in full swing]: America! America! God shed his grace on thee…

KATRIN: He WHAT?

ME: And… - Huh?

KATRIN: God shat his grace on you?

We’re heading for the US. God help us all.

At the end of 2005, Katrin and I visited friends living in East Jerusalem - the Palestinian side regarded as part of the West Bank. During our stay we traveled primarily within the occupied territory, visiting the towns of Hebron, Bethlehem, Jericho, Ramallah, Taybeh, Nablus and Zababdeh. I took a lot of notes on our trip, which I hoped to flesh out later. That never happened, but I recently found something I’d written about the day we spent with a family in Zababdeh, in the north of the West Bank. Zababdeh is one of the few Palestinian towns with a Christian majority. I was surprised to learn through anecdotal and physical evidence that, although most of the citizens are not Muslim, the Israeli government treats them with the same brand of contempt as we saw in other towns like Hebron and Bethlehem, leading me to conclude that, as much as religion, race plays a significant role in Israeli-Palestinian relations.

We visit Reverend F. and his wife R., a young, Christian couple with a little son living in the small West Bank town of Zababdeh. Their house looks new. It is spacious; the walls filled with pictures and religious plaques, the rooms filled with tastefully modest furniture. A piano stands in one corner. The TV is on and equipped with satellite reception. As their young son, P., watches a Jackie Chan movie, the six of us engage in a polite chat about the church as well as current politics. Reverend F. has to leave for an appointment. He says goodbye and takes his son with him.

R. has prepared an enormous and delicious dinner for us. She tells us more about her church, we talk about where we all come from, we laugh hard at jokes. It feels all very suburban, very middle-class.

But it’s far from it.

Reverend F. is a Palestinian. R. is Jordanian. Their house is only rented. In three months she will have to re-apply for her temporary residence visa, something she has to do every few months for permission to stay with her husband and two-year-old son. “Jordan, Palestine, I don’t care where I live, as long as I’m with my family,” she says, her emerald-green eyes betraying concern. For this is not the remark of someone content with the luxury of living here or there but rather of someone for whom neither may be a possibility. Her applications to reside in Zababdeh, in the Palestinian area, have been denied before, not by the Palestinian National Authority, but by the Israeli government. In those previous times, she has had to move back to Jordan, without her husband and son, until the Israeli government decided to let here return - a wait that has taken as long as eight months.

Moving the family to Jordan is not easy either. Reverend F., a minister of the Episcopal Church, can not choose where to serve; that is decided by the local bishop sitting in East Jerusalem, who has shown no indication of moving him anywhere. And if he is moved, there’s no guarantee it would be a place where R. could join him. “We can’t live like this forever,” she says while sipping tea from the comfort of an oversized armchair. The striking contrast between the gravity of her words and the simple luxury of her surroundings is in this moment as incomprehensible for me as any real-world situation is for the student of its theory. The reality of R.’s life is made all the more unfathomable as we sit around a large, round table eating a wonderfully cooked meal in a dining room that could be found in any American home. The conversation is light; we share stories, compliment the cooking and laugh.

The reality, however, is never far away - right outside of their front door, in fact. A day-long rain has made the front yard a muddy swamp. The car struggles and slides its way onto an equally muddy road lined with decrepit houses and shops. Villagers step carefully among the holes and deep tire tracks, trying to avoid getting wet as much as possible. Zababdeh’s largest, and seemingly sole, industry is olive oil. Groves of olive trees can be seen everywhere. Palestinians, however, are not permitted to sell their goods to Israeli businesses, so there are no prospects of supporting, much less expanding, their meager economies.

R. takes us to the church Pastor F. serves. It is a simple building in the middle of town. Next to it is a smaller building used as a community and education center. The church is very active in the community. The backside of it serves as a clinic, which provides medical services for the locals as inexpensively as possible. As we walk into the church, Katrin and I notice it is in complete disarray. The pews are askew, chips of paint and stone litter the floor, even the small organ sits at an awkward angle to the wall. “The Israeli army,” R. says, seeing our confused looks. “They did this to our church.” She tells us about a day not long ago when soldiers appeared here with weapons and bulldozers. With few words - more orders than explanations - they commandeered the church to use as a lookout post from which they could observe a dormitory building not far away. “The dorm was empty,” R. explained. “There was no one to watch.” The soldiers rearranged the pews and moved the organ “to have something to lean against.” A bulldozer was called in to enter the recently built dorm. As it passed the church, it dislodged some of the bricks, leaving minor but considerably expensive structural damage. “We have no means to repair this,” she says, pointing to a corner missing several bricks.

She then takes us down to the dormitory, a five-story building recently constructed to house students of the local college. It is completely unusable. Where balconies once jutted out are now only crude holes and jagged metal beams. The rooms are exposed to the elements; bullet holes mark the walls of several rooms. “They found no one,” R. explains. “They simply shot to destroy our property.” Neither the small college nor the village have the money to repair the structures. Is there any chance of receiving compensation from the Israeli government? R. looks at the remains of the dorm and pile of rubble before it. “They never pay,” she says. “They only destroy and leave.”