Wangerooge - Laziness

Rain, rain, rain...

Today the weather is really bad. It got colder and it is raining sinced hours. Since it is the last day of my vacation (we will be leaving tomorrow), I decided to be totally lazy. The weather usually is not holding me back from bicycling (I have good rain protecting clothes) and wind and rough climate belongs to the north sea islands for my oppinion. But today I don't even wanna go out at all. When will I have the next chances to sit in silence, read a book, write some notes??? I will probably have to wait another year for the next chance.

So, lets enjoy the silence and peace on this beautiful island.

Wangerooge - Geocaching

Geocaching did not really keep me busy here. I had a maximum of 7 caches to find on this island. One of them is a webcam cache. I find those caches to be senseless and so I left it. Another one was said to be a 4 kilometre walk through the Dunes and another one was 222 steps up a tower. I couldn't do any of them since my achilles tendon is always hurting after a few steps already.

Besides those unsolvable caches, I had one DNF and 4 founds. The DNF was funny...because I still have no idea of what I did wrong. It was an easy multi cache with 15 waypoints. At home I would not even try to start with such a monster. But here it was a nice walk through the village and I found every station and solved every riddle. But in the end I could not find the cache location. The calculated coordinates led me to a house that was situated less than 100 metres from another cache final. So, I must have done something wrong. My smart sister will be here next week and she will surely tell me what I did wrong.

Wangerooge - Jale and Winni

This is how a day with Winni and Jale looks like...in a few words:

bicycling, beach running, bungee, telling each other fantasy stories, bicycling, pizza, ice cream, playing games, horse riding.

It is real fun and so nice for me to be able to spend so much time together with Jale. Since Julia spends her days with her mother, I have Jale all for my own...perfect! Julia kept telling me that family holidays with Jale are stressfull and exhausting, but she is wrong. She is the same wrong as she is in many other topics.

Wangerooge - Geocaching

After a nice morning at the beach, I slept 2 hours (!!!) in the afternoon. Some clouds came up on the far horizon and I thought that it was now time to go for some geocaches. There are not many on this island and they all seem to be fairly easy.

I did 3 caches today and they kept me busy for not longer than 2 hours. First I was wondering why there are so many micro caches here in unspectacular hiding places. There are so many untouched places and cool hiding spots here. But then I thought it over and think the cachers have done good with their decisions of hiding geocaches. The whole area is a nature reservate and it is forbidden (for good reasons) to even leave the paths. Let us keep it like that. Respect nature!

As I said, The caches have been unspectacular but they gave a lot of informations to me and showed me some quiet and peacefull spots that I would not have discovered on my own during one week. So, again I can recommend you to do some geocaching first whenever you go on vacation. It will provide you with informations about the surrounding, history and „insider“ tipps.

Caches today:

GC17VQH

GC14Q89

GCGWCJ

Wangerooge - Comparing Islands

Größere Kartenansicht

During our vacation we spent 2 weeks on the Island of Mallorca/Spain and 2 days on the North-Sea Island Wangerooge so far. No wonder if I am comparing those locations sometimes even though it is is impossible and unneccessary to compare them.

Wangerooge is a small island (maps link) in a fairly rough and open sea while Mallorca is large and situated in the mediterranean sea.

So, I should not compare...but I still do! And here are some points I could mention:

Climates:

Wangerooge: The german north sea islands are said to have the most healthy climate. Situated offshore it is like high-sea climate. Air filled with jodine and salt, good for your lungs and skin.

Mallorca: The climate is smooth and the air is always gentle to you. But you will never smell the sea or the air....except when the dustbins have just been emptied. But over here you will never face temperatures below 25°C in summer. Usually it will be around 30°C.

Beaches:

Wangerooge: The high tide brings you enough water for bathing only once a day and many tourists are disappointed when they look over the dike and don't see the expected ocean but only brown mud everywhere. To me this high and low tide is fascinating and I can watch the sea come and go. This changes also make the beaches here more wide. Fine white sand with a lot of mussels, crabs etc. to be found near the waterline. Even at low tide I can walk for hours, enjoying the air, the sound of waves, the smell of the sea. (yes..over here the sea smells like sea should smell. Salty, fishy.....different)

Mallorca: Weather guarantee and a calm sea make the beach easy to enjoy for little kids as well as for drunken tourists. But the beaches are not really tidy and on the westcoast there are nearly no waves. Besides that, it is so very crowded that it is nearly impossible to play around with kids in the sand. Beaches on westcoast Mallorca are boring!

Tourists:

Wangerooge: Mainly germans and so everything is in order and well-organized on Wangerooge. None is too loud, they behave well on the beach and they are separating their waste. Boring... just like home! Unfortunately no swedish people here...hehee!

Mallorca: A mix of different languages, nationalities, characters and habits. You don't need a book or TV or iPod to entertain yourself. Just keep your eyes, ears and nose open and you will be a part of a vivid documentation on human behave and misbehave.

Let's just say that those spots are not to be compared. Their characters are just too different. For those who prefer to feel, smell and explore nature, for sure Wangerooge is the better choice. Those who want to do a pure beach vacation with weather guarantee and a lot of life around everywhere should chose Mallorca.

And after you finish your Mallorcan vacation, you can still go to Wangerooge to relax from Mallorca.

Wangerooge

We had only one day at home to do our laundry and catch Julias mother from Hanover airport. Today we left again for another, totally different island: Wangerooge. Wangerooge is one of the seven islands situated just a few kilometres from the mainland of northwest germany. It is a nature reservate where cars are prohibited and nature takes priority over human living.

So it was the total opposite of Mallorca Island. We live only 110 kilometres far from Wangerooge but the trip to the island was the same long as it was to Mallorca. By car, ship, train it took us 4,5 hours to get to our flat!

The first think I did was to rent a bicycle and to discover the west of the island. The island is only about 6 km wide and so it is easy to drive from east to westcoast in less than 30 minutes ... if the wind is not too strong.

I even did some geocaching today. There was a simple traditional cache on the westcoast of Wangerooge. It was hidden already in 2003 and is still there. I like those nearly historical caches and decided to go for this one first.

The second one was a simple multi-mystery-cache that provided me with some interesting informations about the „moving“ of the island during the centuries.

I easily found out what the final location was, but 222 steps were too much for my damaged achilles tendon...so I left it.

Los Linkos:

East Frisian Islands-Wiki (engl)

Wangerooge-Official homepage (german)

Wangerooge-Wiki (engl)