Once again on our hiking shoes, we noticed a new sign board in the forest above Billroda, the inscription of which referred to a boundary stone of the Kingdom of Prussia.

The dark gray clouds on the way to Freyburg to Neuenburg Castle indicated snowfall, but it had stayed dry until our arrival at the Unstrut Bridge.

When it comes to hiking, the Harz region really offers something for everyone. Even those who associate hiking more with the term “walking” will find a network of easy-to-use terrain paths in most tourist locations, which can often be varied as desired.

The Saale-Unstrut-Elster-Rad-Eight (Acht) is a 178 km long regional tourist cycle route in Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia, which connects the cycle routes along the Saale, Unstrut and White Elster.

And now they shine and turn again, the often-handcrafted wooden light roundabouts, which are meant to warm hearts outdoors or at home as pre-Christmas decorations.

Visible from afar and therefore attractive for visitors, the Wendelstein castle ruins are located between 30 and 50 meters above the Unstrut river on a gypsum rock that slopes steeply towards the shore.

The thriller about the Nebra Sky Disc still never ends. It was initially the tense story about the professional robbery of the artefacts after the sky disc was found on July 4th, 1999 on the Mittelberg in the former municipality of Ziegelroda near the city of Nebra in Saxony-Anhalt, now it's the analyses of the actual age the sky disc that excite the mind.

The small town of Bad Bibra is in the Saale-Unstrut tourist region and in the Saale-Unstrut-Triasland nature park, a destination for us that we have already visited several times with the HNF bikes.

Autumn sunshine and the desire for exercise, once again the most important reasons to get on our bikes and explore the still new surroundings. Our motto, which is confirmed again and again: there is still so much to discover, you just have to do it.

Located just a few kilometers below the well-known Rudelsburg, the historically valuable Saale bridge connects the older part of Bad Kösen on the right of the Saale with the newer part on the left bank of the river and has long been an important Saale crossing in the course of the medieval Via Regia, the course of which in big parts is the modern federal highway 87.

Visit from our friend Philipp and his girlfriend Jule, with whom we had undertaken countless hikes and discovery excursions during the project work on the Balkans and here especially in Greece.

The view out of the window on Sunday morning was good enough to collect our backpack and go on another hike to explore the region around Billroda.

In our blog article "Ghost beech in Bad Kösen" we had already described a section of the hiking trail network that ultimately leads to the Rudelsburg, partly through wonderful shady deciduous forest and partly within sight of the Saale river.

On the way to our authors' meeting in Halle, we wanted to visit the Harz town of Stolberg again, which we could only pass by during our last excursion in the spring due to lack of time, but which we had still had in mind due to the wonderful half-timbered buildings.

The research for an ATM machine led us into the city centre of Naumburg in southern Saxony-Anhalt for the first time, whose landmark, the early Gothic cathedral of St. Peter and Paul, is one of the most valuable European monuments today.

Brilliant sunshine in April had motivated us to take another walk, far away from large numbers of people despite Corona, so in choosing our destination we were sure not to meet anyone, which should also prove to be correct since all of the so-called local attractions were closed anyway.

If you are traveling in different regions of Germany, you will occasionally come across interesting buildings of bygone eras, which, sometimes surprisingly, will be given high priority again due to changing use and changed tourist interests.

The Eckartsburg with its 36-metre-high tower can be seen from afar, because it is located on the Finne, a high ridge on the state border of Saxony-Anhalt to Thuringia.

Another walk has taken us along the Lossa creek, where we came across an almost heavenly piece of land, beginning at the end of village Billroda.

The next day was to be followed by another tour of downtown Halle, so Detlef did not just have the Old Market with its donkey well in mind, but also the only existing Museum of music history of the Beatles.