We were ten minutes late getting into Hamburg, but that did not matter, and there we caught a "real" train, the ICE (InterCity Express) that took us at high speed south through the center of Germany towards Switzerland. As the train thundered on through the old university town Göttingen, we read and napped, and watched the scenery go by.

Late in the afernoon, we arrived in Basel, the Swiss junction city on the border, where we changed to a Swiss train for the run to Geneva, largely along the north shore of the lake.

We arrived in the early evening and shared a taxi with another Assyriologist to our hotel, the Bel'Espérance, in the old Salvation Army headquarters and still run by the Salvation Army. That night was the first I had spent ashore since some time in July, 2014.

On this trip, however, we stayed in the old city, which still maintains some of its medieval air, and found it much more congenial.

Like everyone who ever spent any time in Zürich, I remember seeing postcards on diplay showing the Alps, snowy behind the local hills, and thinking that they were painted in (this was before Photoshop), but one day, when the atmospheric conditions were right, there they were, and so it was on this trip. We went back slong the north shore of Lake Geneva, and the Dents de Midi and the Alps of the Berner Oberland (the Eiger and others) showed up ghostly white against the sky and the clouds.

Although not really the capital of the Swiss Confederation (there is no one capital city, by design), Bern is the location of the Swiss Parliament. It is well known as a scenic city. The oldest part of the town is on a high ridge inside a big loop of the Aare River far below, so it has location advantages.

The buildings however, are mostly eighteenth or nineteenth century, so the city is really a later city with a medieval ground-plan.

On Saturday, June 27th, Barbara had a meeting until noon and then we boarded our train for the North. We ran the same route in reverse, finally arriving at the Scandinavian Quay just before midnight. Much to our surprise, there were several other passengers; evidently a ferry was about to leave for Sweden, or Finland. Her cargo holds would have been already loaded with trucks, a process we could easily observe from our berth, and she was now taking on the last of her holiday-maker passengers.

We found Barbara none the worse for her week of enforced idleness, and altough we had enjoyed the trip, and stayed in very comfortable hotels, we were happy to tumble exhausted into our own bed.

We took a couple of days to recover from the trip, change Barbara's engine oil and fill her water tanks, and rig her again for canal work.

While we understood why most boat-owners in Lüeck would want to keep their boats in Travemünde or in one of the many marinas along the river, we pushed on until we could moor in the old harbor in the middle of the city, where perhaps Hansa-ships had moored while loading for a trip to Russia and up the Neva River.

By July, asparagus season was over, but it was time for Pfifferlinge, a very tasty wild mushroom, and at dinner in the Sea-Captains' Guild Hall I had a delicious cutlet with these mushrooms in a cream sauce.

Stolpersteine: In the mid-nineties, the German artist Gunter Demnig, wanting to create some kind of memorial to the millions of people killed by the National Socialists, hit on the idea of planting Stolpersteine, literally "stumbling blocks," in front of the former houses of people deported and killed by the regime. There are now some 50,000 of these in place, not only in Germany. They are brass plaques set into the pavement in front of a house, each recording the name and fate of a person who lived in the house. Sometimes there is a single marker, sometimes a cluster.

The idea is to make a de-centralized memorial that is, perhaps, not so easy to ignore as a single monument, and to make clear that the victims were not off in some corner, but were in the middle of everyday life. We look for these markers as we travel, feeling some obligation to take notice.

A few cities, notably Munich, have not allowed these markers, and in some cities, markers have been vandalized. We later saw some in Minden that had marks, as from a pick, but in Lübeck they are (perhaps sadly) cherished and kept polished.

We all enjoyed Lübeck, but the time came when we thought we should move on, that there would be other places to enjoy, so on July 4th, we headed out, around the north end of the old city through the Kuckhaven and the Kanal Trave to the Elbe-Lübeck Canal and south toward Lüneburg.

We were following in reverse the route taken since the fourteenth century by ships carrying salt from the mines of Lüneburg to Lübeck, where it was stored in huge warehouses, some of which can still be seen, until it was shipped all over the Baltic. Some of it was used in Sweden and Denmark to preserve the herring catch. In the fifteenth century, more than 30,000 tons of salt per year traveled along the canal.