June 13, 2025

 Friday. Berlin-Prenzlauerberg. Left a little after 9:30. Focus. Summer. Back to the Teltow Canal at Adlershof; a little more efficient and less trafficy than the way up yesterday. Picking up the Mauerweg at the canal meant starting a long section on the south side of the old West Berlin, mostly park or woodlands, with green space on the left (the old GDR) and beyond the trees and bushes on the right the villages of Berlin. Sometimes the route led through a neighborhood, but never for very long. There were long sections on asphalt, but there was gravel also. Some detouring in the neighborhood of Teltow, at a point in the day when I was looking for a good way to head back again. The back-and-forth to the route takes almost as much time as tracing the route itself, which is why, if you only have half a day, you can't do the entire route in three days. So another more-or-less straight shot across town back, this time from the southwest and south. Tempelhof, straight up to downtown, right toward and across Alexanderplatz. In the news the Israeli attack on Iran, which is ominous. One has to think that, just as the Israelis have thought all this through every possible way for years, so Teheran must have been prepared for this (and worse, as in the Americans joining the attacks, which could still happen). It's hard to see, as it always was, that airstrikes alone would set back Iran's progress toward the nuclear weapons threshold very much. Perhaps this attack will push it across. There are other possibilities, not all of them desperate. Less than one day in, it is still hard to say where this will go next.