This is an old post that I wrote some months ago but never published yet. The story is about our holiday in Portugal in August 2010 when we drove along the Atlantic coast from Lisbon up to Viena do Castelo in the north. The holiday was not just meant as a sand collecting trip and [...]

Ernestus Barsa, another sand collector from Austria, reported on his website about a street in Vienna called Sandgasse (Sand Alley). Just by coincidence I drove yesterday to a small town in the surrounding of Dresden and found the Sandweg, which can be translated approximately in the same way – the Sand Alley. I just found [...]

With almost 6,000 km of coastline (about 2,000 km on mainland and another 4,000 km on the islands), Croatia is a great destination for sand collecting freaks. We just returned from a three-week holiday in which we drove 4,900 km and camped in several places along the Croatian coast. Of course I had my collecting [...]

Our trekking tour this weekend was very close to the CZ-DE border between Decin and Petrovice (CZ). When we stopped for a small break I just noticed two boulders of sandstone looking very, very old. We stopped the car and I had a closer look. The stones were very strong weathered revealing also beautiful layers [...]

For those of you traveling to Harz region in Germany I highly recommend a visit to the Kräuterpark Altenau. This is a family-own garden with lots of green spices and herbs. There is also a nice “spice pagoda” where you can read about the trips made by the owner in the whole world in search [...]

The Oderteich is a lake in Lower Saxony, Germany. The lake served as water reservoir for downstream mining activities (Sankt Andreasberg), nowadays being used also for recreational purposes. We had a stop at the lake during our trip to Harz and could observe the lake surroundings from close distance. The water has a reddish color [...]

Perhaps one of the most impressive moments during our trip to Harz mountains was visiting the Iberg Dripstone Cave (Iberger Tropfsteinhöhle). The cave is located on the western side of the mountains near Bad Grund city and is formed within a chalk deposit, a former coral reef about 385 million years ago. The cave was [...]

Some people may complain that German natural landscape is rather unspectacular. The North Sea and Baltic Sea in the north, some mountains in the south and not so much in between. Well, for those who may think like that I strongly recommend a visit to the… Harz region! Why is Harz so interesting and why [...]

The Altenberger lake is an artificial lake with a surface of about 4 ha located 10 km south of Eisenach in the German state of Thuringia. Since 1950, the lake is surrounded by a camping site and is nowadays visited by numerous campers and tourists. The lake shores are vegetated and only a very small [...]

We had to visit a friend in Berlin a few days ago and, since the weather was great, we decided to drive back home using mostly national roads and avoid the busy highway. We were happy to do that since we could see some really nice places in the outskirts of Berlin. Among them, we [...]