Sunday, Sept 16

We woke up and made breakfast here. It really wasn't nearly as fun as having frustuck in a gasthaus! I made eggs and I do mean they were fresh! All the eggs here are brown and this one must have been right out of the chicken! The feather is on the outside!



- The interesting thing is that they don't refrigerate eggs in the grocery stores...they are just at room temp...go figure.

So today was laundry day...we were starting to recycle clothes so it was time to do some wash. Andy's comment yesterday was spot on. I really had trouble figuring out how to work the washing machine here. It's a front loader and on the dial there are about 50 choices of what to do. Hey...I think I'll go downstairs right now and take a picture of the dial...you see what you think.
Ok...here's this dial on the washing machine:



So this all meant nothing to me...I don't even understand the temperature because it's in celsius. So my line of thinking was : I'll just go somewhere in the middle...so 60 degrees sounds good. So I turned it to the 60 at about the 2:00 position. Some numbers flashed up on the little black screen and the water started running.

So I went upstairs and fixed our "feather" egg breakfast. We had a nice leisurely breakfast...taking about an hour. So after breakfast, Leo was doing the dishes and I went down to get the laundry. It was still going. I looked on the little black screen and it said "1:24". I watched it for a minute and it then said "1:23"....cripey! it still had 1 1/2 hours to go! I then realized that the numbers that I saw flash on the little screen when I first started it, was around 2:43...that was the time for the entire wash to finish! Like I said in my comment yesterday...with that much time it should have been washed, dried, and put away!!

So we had 3 loads of wash...so you do the math to figure out how long that took. Oh, and also...they don't have dryers here...it is wasteful energy to them..so you hang your clothes outside. So the lady here put up a clothesline and we hung our clothes out with clothespins (and Janel, we think those are antiques!!).

In between washing stints...we took a nice hike ...around 5 kms. Lots of people come up here to the forests to hike. We are at some altitude...but I'm not sure how much. Anyway, here are some of the many sights we saw on our hike. All of the pictures are within 5 km of this house.

















































Here's the house where we are staying. As you can see, it's in the middle of nowhere...or everywhere!



So after the hike and doing so much laundry, we were hungry and so here was our lunch for the day. Yum! Lots of veggies and fruit!


And later on...about mid-afternoon, we went to one of the little villages close by and went to a cafe and ordered a coffee and split an apple begnet (sp?). We were on our way back to the house and somehow took a wrong turn and Gwendolyn got all messed up. We were driving on the usual roads for awhile...which is the equivalent of about a 1 1/2 lane road. At one point the road narrowed to a one-laner, then the road was an unpaved dirt road and was only about 3/4 of a lane. We just prayed that another car wouldn't come along. Finally, the road started heading into a forested area...where people were walking, again only about 3/4 of a lane wide. Gwendolyn was still telling us to go there, but we stopped to ask a nice man who thankfully spoke great English and told us that we should turn around because we were on a hiking trail! Very impressive! We turned around and Leo said something about being on 150th and Plowed Ground!

Jason, we thought you'd be interested in this...outside of the house here on the patio is this grill for grilling spiesebraten...roast pork. It's a fireplace type grill...fueled by wood...and then the grill is suspended over the fire area. It's lowered by a pulley system. Here are some pictures with detail. We didn't use it, but thought it was interesting...and neat that it uses wood only.








For dinner...you know the chicken breasts that we got yesterday at the grocery store? Well Leo thought that it was chicken, but when I took it out of the wrapped package they were 2 honking big chicken breasts. After cooking it and tasting it, we determined that it was turkey...oh well....we don't know what we're doing half the time around here...but it sure is fun!

After dinner we had a webchat using my ipad with Matt and Joy. Joy asked if 40 years ago when I was here did I ever think I'd be over here again doing a video webchat with my kids back home?? It is truly amazing what we take for granted now! Here's a picture of the chat:




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Location:Black Forest