A church under the Alps

Some trips you remember for one big moment. This one I remember in pieces, and all of them are good.

It started as a road trip. The kind where the drive is half the point. Green fields, small Bavarian villages, and the mountains slowly getting bigger in the windscreen until they stopped looking like a postcard and started looking like a wall.

On the way we passed a Fossil watch production unit. I don't know why that stuck with me so much. Maybe because I'd only ever seen those watches in shop windows, behind glass, and here was the place they actually came from, just sitting by the road like any other building. It's a strange feeling when something you know as a brand suddenly becomes a real place.

The boat

At Königssee you can't just drive to the church. You take a boat across the lake. The water is this unreal green, so clear you keep looking over the side, and the mountains come straight down into it on both sides.

The boat trip was fantastic. There was music on board, and a guide who explained the history of the place as we went: why the church was built where it is, what the lake has meant to people here for centuries. I understood maybe most of it. It didn't matter. The voice, the music and the quiet of the lake all kind of blended together.

Some places don't need you to understand them. They just need you to be quiet for a minute.

The church

And then St. Bartholomä comes into view. A small white church with red onion domes, sitting right at the edge of the water, with the Alps rising up behind it. Honestly, the architecture was a blessing for the eyes. It looks almost too perfect, like someone placed it there to make the mountains look even bigger.

I took this photo on my iPhone 7 Plus. Nothing special in terms of gear. But I remember standing there thinking I didn't need a better camera. I just needed to not mess it up.

I've taken a lot of photos since then, with much better cameras. This one is still on the wall in my head.

— Desly