Normally in January I start writing my year in review. I know that sounds early, but it’s hard to remember all that you’ve done over the year and it makes the task easier in December…even if I am already off track in March. But not this year! This year I’m writing my year in review completely from scratch.
January
We kicked off the New Year in New Jersey. Sleeping. How exciting, right? But what else can you do after a transatlantic flight? C spent the week exploring my hometown area, getting to know my best buds, seeing where I went to college, and racing around NYC for a day. Topped off the trip with the wedding of two great friends in Wilkes-Barre, PA.
hiking within walking distance from my home in Jefferson, NJ 
the famous Jefferson Diner 
high line park in NYC
With so much excitement, the rest of January was quiet. There was a rainy day at the Botanical Garden in Berlin and another Sunday hiking through the city’s Grunewald.
February
The big trip in February was spending a week in Slovenia in the Lake Bled region. Even though I had been to Slovenia before, Lake Bled is breathtaking. And there is so much great nature in the area to explore that we left wanting more! Now that I’ve visited Slovenia twice, I definitely need to write about it because I love it so much!
Then we did a very Berlin thing and a very Hamburg thing. We went to the Berlinale Film Festival in Berlin, Germany’s largest film festival. And we went to the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg for an event. The way-to-expensive philharmonic was impressive!
Was that enough in February? Nope! Another weekend was spent checking out Lübeck. We ate a lot of brunch, went to the Heinrich and Thomas Mann museum, and visited the oldest and most beautiful Rathaus in Germany (with the best guided tour!).
March
No time for traveling much in March, but we did manage to do my favorite hike of the 66-Lakes-Trail. This is a two day tour of nearly 50 kilometers from Wendisch Reitz to Halbe with a night camping on Neuendorfer See in between. Going on this hike was the beginning of preparing for our big hiking trip to come in April.
April
Continuing training, we hiked one of the only round trip hikes I’ve done in Berlin. The hike left from Fürstenberg, goes past Stechlin, to the border of Brandenburg and Mecklenburg where we camped on the Ellbogensee, and back to Fürstenberg the following day.
But really nothing in the flatness of Berlin and Brandenburg could prepare me for our hiking trip to Wales. The Pembrokeshire Coast Path traverses 186 miles of coastline in the Pembroke region of Wales from Amroth Castle to Cardigan. We were lucky that we came back with tans from so much sun instead of moldy socks from rainy Britain, but it was windy and cold for most of the trip. While I found hiking up and down the cliffs challenging, the views of the sea and sheep were incredible and well worth the trip.
May
This was a much more chill month. I think I needed a week to warm up and recover after Wales. We went on a nice bike ride around Erkner, near Berlin, and climbed at the Teufelsberg in the Grunewald.
June
Two years ago I had gone on a solo kayak trip to the Mecklenburg Lake District and had a great adventure. I decided to repeat it again and drag C along! It was such a fun-filled weekend that I wrote two posts on it (here and here) and another one about how to plan your own paddle adventure there.
The water-filled weekend kicked off a month of beach visits, heading to Müggelsee east of Berlin and to Saatewinkel beach on Tegeler See.
July
Any less travel-filled months were made up with all the traveling I did in July. I spent the first two weeks in Indonesia with 10 students on a program called Operation Wallacea to explore the depths of the jungle as well as the depths of the ocean. The program was extremely interesting, challenging, and anything but luxury.
With just a day to unpack and repack, C and I headed off for our bike adventure from Berlin to Copenhagen. We spent two weeks cycling through Brandenburg and Mecklenburg in Germany and then through Falster, Mon, and Zealand in Denmark. Nearly to Copenhagen, we took a week’s break for some climbing and nature on the Danish island of Bornholm.
August
Trying to make the summer holidays last forever, I visited a colleague in her hometown of Istanbul, Turkey. I have been dying to go to Turkey for what feels like forever and was so lucky to have a local to show me the best time! Summer is great in Istanbul. It’s a crazy busy city, so I was really happy to enjoy my time staying on the Prince Islands off the coast.
While I was there C had been hiking the Maler Weg, a trail in the Sächsische Schweiz (or the Switzerland of Saxony) and I was able to accompany him on his final leg of the journey. The rock formations and landscapes are amazing. I definitely need to spend more time in this region.
C hadn’t had enough adventure with the bike trip to Copenhagen and the Maler Weg, so he biked from Berlin to Nuremberg. The last weekend in August, I visited him en route in Leipzig.
September
At the end of his tour, I met C again in Nuremberg. We enjoyed the Albrecht Dürer museum (a German painter from the 15th century), the city’s castle, Lebkuchen (gingerbread cookies), and the Document Center about the Nazi Party Rally Grounds.
I also went on a solo trip to visit some friends I had made paddling the first time in Mecklenburg. They invited me to their village and to show me around the area. The Schächerbach Tour is a premium German hiking path, but that was just the beginning of a marvelous weekend in Marburg!
Marktplatz in Marburg 
looking at the old railroad bridge over the Ohm River in Homberg-Ohm
October
The 3rd of October is Reunification Day in Germany and sometimes means a nice long weekend. This year we took the opportunity to spend 4 days with friends climbing in Bavaria’s Frankenjura region. The weather report was terrible, but we still got in a decent amount of climbing at the cold, foggy crags.
For this school year, I am trying to reduce how much I am flying. In order to meet that goal but still get some sun, we decided to take the train for the autumn break. To Sicily. From Berlin. We broke up the forever long train ride by stopping for two days in Naples to visit my relatives and eat as much pizza as I could possibly stuff inside me. From there, we got on the overnight train to Sicily. The train even gets on a ferry! Sicily is much bigger than we imagined but we still got in some great hikes and some more pizza.
November
While biking over the summer, we passed through Güstrow, a town I had never heard of. But the castle there intrigued me so much that I just had to go back. We only had one day there, but there is definitely more I would like to go and check out another time.
Although November isn’t the greatest time of year for weather in Berlin, we still went out and did a few hikes. One Sunday was spent hiking from Potsdam to Werder, just outside of Berlin. Another Sunday we went from the top of Grunewald, along the Spree, past Schloss Charlottenburg, into Moabit. The hike was surprisingly quiet for being within the city limits.
December
Technically my parents arrived in November, but they were mostly here in December. Arriving on Thanksgiving, I subjected them to a German/vegetarian version of the holiday, which they tried to enjoy despite their jetlag. We spent a weekend in Dresden and Pirna, visiting the New Vault and its various museums at the Residenzschloss. While in Dresden, we drove to Seiffen which is renowned for wood handicraft, in particular Christmas woodcrafts. Then it was a week of Christmas Markts in Berlin. They went home full of wurst and glüwein.
We hope to ride out the year with a final trip to Nice on the Cote Azure, but with the French transit strike, we’re not sure we’ll get there! Keep your fingers crossed!
This year my travels have become much less solo. I visited 3 new countries, spent a week in the jungle, learned how to cross-country ski, and explored more of my favorite country! I am really excited for all that 2020 will bring and all the new places I will travel to!
How was your year? Have you been amazing new (or old!) places or learned something new? What are you looking forward to in 2020? Tell me below 🙂