Bavaria day 3 - Mountains and Tiger beetles

Today we decided to go out as soon as possible, and have lunch on our walk. It was a good job we did, too, as the supposedly 3 1/2 hour walk took us about 5 hours.

We started at the bottom of a cross between a hill and a mountain. At first, I started leading us in the wrong direction at first, but fortunately I realised before we went too far. Once we started walking along the right path, we were going alongside a river, which was nice as it was very hot today. After we left the river and started to go up more, we got a bit lost, but we managed to find one of the many yellow walking signposts, as well as our path. Then, the path started to get much steeper, and we struggled quite a lot, although much of it was under the trees. We had lunch on a bench part of the way up, and just before we got to the top, we found a small farm/cafe - every walk seems to have at least one. We stopped there for a while (Alpe Oderberg) and I had half a litre of diluted apple juice in a stein.

When we finally got to the top of the small mountain (called Mittagberg, the top being called Barenkopf, presumably in honour of a bear. They had a sign in German about it which we couldn't read), we got an amazing view of the surrounding landscape, particularly the Alps. The was back down was less steep, and was much easier than the way up. We could see and even bigger mountain (ours wasn't that big, in retrospect), with several sheer cliffs on it, directly in front of us. I also managed, after several long frustrating minutes of trying, to photograph an incredibly skittish Green Tiger Beetle (see extra). Once we got back to the car, Mum was much too tired to do the second walk we originally planned on doing, so we went home.