If you remember it you weren’t there.
Charles Fleischer

I told someone last week that one of my regrets was that I hadn’t been born 10 years earlier because then I could have attended Woodstock. “Woodstock???” – was the reply. For a moment, I felt like a relict, out of time.

But last Tuesday, Woodstock came to Garding. In the summer of ’24.

I pulled into Nazareth, was feeling ’bout half past dead
I just need some place where I can lay my head
Hey, mister, can you tell me, where a man might find a bed?
He just grinned and shook my hand, “No” was all he said

It was our last week on the road. One with millions of sheep. One with endless beaches and horizons. One with many family and friends visiting. One with poles indicating the highest tides ever measured. One with really narrow passageways, only for pedestrians, “Nur für Fußgänger”. One with uncountable footprints in the sand. One with tremendous help from an OT working like the best of physios. Where the water was warmer than the air. The food was “Labskaus” although it looked like “Steak Tartare“; or “Futjes“, both of which you only get north of Hamburg. Road signs looked like “I’m Bad” but meant “In the Spa” – one weirder than the other. And the local “Feuerwehr”, the voluntary firefighters, were as present on the muddy fields of the Tating village festival, as they were a few weeks earlier on the equally muddy fields in Wacken, the world’s biggest open air heavy metal festival, just over half an hour from here.

We were here. We were living the most amazing, challenging, exciting, weird and wonderful life in the Summer of ’24.

We won’t ever forget it.

It will carry us through any dark days of whatever kind of winter that might lie ahead of us.

Take a load off Fanny, take a load for free

Take a load off Fanny, and you put the load right on me