Some weeks ago I thought spring weather would start, but then we had again several days in a row with really bad weather. Today was different, I woke up early in the morning with no tasks, I looked out of the window and I saw already a blue heaven and sunshine at 9am. I didn’t think a lot, I just started to pack my camera bag. Spontaneously, I got the idea to do a trip to Bad Oldesloe. I’ve never seen a lot of this town, I’ve been there, but only one time, it was the time when I was 18 and when I had a physical examination in Bad Oldesloe for the German military service. Even if Bad Oldesloe is not far away from my hometown Lübeck, I’ve never showed a lot of interest to visit it again, but that changes a few months ago when I was looking for good day trip places.
As I am currently still in Reinfeld, Bad Oldesloe is even closer now, and it would just take around 6 minutes with the train, it couldn’t be more practical for a lazy guy like me. So, visiting Bad Oldesloe, that was planned since some weeks, but today was the perfect weather to do it spontaneously. I did put both of my lenses into my bag, the Nikkor 18-105mm would allow me to take nice city and architecture pictures at the wide end, and my Tamron 70-300mm would be good for things in the distance. Bad Oldesloe has a nature reserve too, the area is called Brenner Moor and is the north of the city, and it’s a salt marsh. In fact, it’s the biggest salt marsh in the federal state Schleswig-Holstein, and the Trave you know from my Lübeck photos is flowing through this area too.
So, the idea was to wander through the city, and after that I wanted to hike to the mentioned marsh to take nature and bird photos or what ever I would find there. As always, my photos will be uploaded but delayed, but if you are regular reader, you know how I handle this. In this post here I just want to talk about my day. I enjoyed my trip to this town, as mentioned, the Trave River is flowing through it too, and they have a lot of very beautiful wooden footbridges so that you can cross the river, and I wonder why we don’t have a lot of those wooden bridges in Lübeck, we can cross the Trave too, but our bridges look different. Apart from that, I saw very rustic and beautiful architecture, in many areas it looked like a medieval town too. But then I wanted to visit the marsh.
If you wonder why there is the term “Local Newspaper” in the title of this post, something funny happened to me today. I was taking photos when I was walking along the safe paths of the marsh, and then I met a woman who was talking with two other people, and they approached me right away, and we had a talk about something we love, the nature. I noticed that the woman had a notepad, and she asked the other both questions and noted some things. Then she talked with me, she asked me some basic question like “What brings you into the nature?”, “How do you feel after you spent some time in the nature?” and then she also asked me how I would think about the Trave and I told her “In my hometown, it’s the river where you can take a walk and relax”.
Finally, she wanted to take a picture of me with her camera, and she asked me about my name and told me that she would like to include me in an article in the local newspaper. I am usually not a great fan of newspapers, I try to seek independent and objective information’s with no political stance, our German media doesn’t do a great job, but I know the local paper she is working for, and they usually craft stories that don’t have a political message hidden in the article, which means I gave her the permission to include me. Also it was about our local nature anyway, and that is something I like to stand for. It seems she asked other people, and I guess the article will be about different people and why they like to spend time in our local nature, it’s probably a column about the topic.
She said it will come out this weekend, and of course I will purchase a copy (laugh). However, before I agreed with her, I told her that I would only agree with the printed article, but that I don’t want to be included online. I did a great job over the last decade, even if you would know my full name, you wouldn’t find anything about me via Google, and I told her that’s exactly how I want it to be. She said, the article would only appear in the printed paper, not on their website, and I said that would be totally fine then. I never wanted to get a lot of attention in the internet, privacy is something very important to me, and with blogging it’s something totally different, I can share words or photos with my blog, but I can do this without telling the world my full name. But I am ok with the local newspaper, and since the article will mention me in the context with nature and photography, who knows, maybe I can use this to get into the photography career one day.
So much about my day, I hope you had a great day too!
Diary of Dennis 
I will look forward to the pictures Dennis, you do have some pretty places near your home. I agree with you that many newspapers are now not reporting political events objectively but rather allowing corporate interests to direct their opinions. As most of our papers are owned by Rupert Murdoch I know it only too well. However, local papers are interesting because you can read about things that are happening in your own community. I always like to read the local papers when I am travelling as it helps me get a feel for the place I’m in.
Over the last decade, whenever they did set up an industry area or living area, they did also declare another area to be a nature reserve, that is at least one political thing I like, but still I think the nature reserve areas should even be bigger. Anyway, today it seems that most towns have a nature reserve where plants can grow, where animals can live and grow up, and that means we do have indeed some pretty places, and some of our towns here in the north are cool too, yes. I like to read the locals too, there are more articles about local culture and things that happen around me, and less about national or international politics, I agree.