Easter Week II, and some firsts

My previous Easter Week post ended with Easter Sunday, but of course that was not yet the end of Easter. In Germany, Easter Monday is a bank holiday, and children are off school for two weeks. Since Good Friday is also a holiday here, most people whose jobs are not in a line of work that requires them to be there on weekends and holidays will have had two working weeks of 4 days each.

While these short working weeks are welcome, for many of us they also mean that we have to do the same tasks but complete them in a shorter time. Still, I managed quite well, and now everything is back to normal.

Easter Monday (6 April) was a perfect day of spring sunshine, and after a chilly morning, the thermometer reached a very pleasant 20C/68F. As every year, the village band were providing the music for the family mass in church, and as usual on such occasions, I go to church with O.K. While there were a good number of families with children, the church was by no means full.

Stork in the nest on top of the former fire station.

Close-up of the nest; it is one of several in the village.

view from the church across the village

Hofweier village church

The band getting ready

Afterwards, we were glad to simply warm up leftovers from our Easter Sunday meal and thus have a quick lunch, followed by half an hour of rest.

At around 2:00 pm, we headed out for a walk straight from the cottage - my favourite kind. We very much enjoyed every step of the ca. 14 km we walked in the countryside made so beautiful by spring, among orchards and vineyards and into the woods with their first tender green and the birdsong. At one point, a deer crossed our path - it was all very idyllic with surprisingly few other people about.

Coming through the village of Diersburg, we saw that the beer garden was open, and we had our first shandy of this season right there sitting in the sun before tackling the last 2 km or so back to O.K.'s village.

Diersburg

We were back at about 6:00 pm and later had a meal of my Mum's home-made Maultaschen (see the post linked above if you don't know what they are) and watched two old episodes of Midsomer Murders together, with Barnaby played by John Nettles and Troy as his assistant. A perfect day!

On Tuesday (7 April) it was time for me to return to Ludwigsburg. Another wonderful sunny day meant I made sure to finish work early enough to go for a walk, and when my sister suggested we visit the palace grounds together, I was all for it. She had not yet been this season and agreed with me that the artificial decorations I showed you previously are ugly and completely unnecessary.

glorious magnolia tree in the palace grounds

I can rarely resist the chance for some silliness!

Wednesday (8 April) was just as beautiful. I worked at the office in Weilimdorf and in the evening visited my Mum along with my sister.

For the second time that week, I worked at the office on Thursday (9 April), training some new colleagues in the basics of data protection. After work, I did not get off the train at Ludwigsburg's main station but waited until the next stop. From there, it is only a bit more than an hour to walk to Benningen across the fields, saving myself the ugliest part of the route.

Sunrise on Wednesday morning, seen from my kitchen

This time, however, I had to backtrack and find different paths, finding the usual paths blocked by construction work nearly everywhere I turned. It felt like it cost me a lot of time, but when I finally did make it to Benningen, I found that the entire walk had only taken 20 minutes longer than expected. And those "new" paths were nice to explore, too.

I am pretty sure I have never walked here before.

apple blossoms

This is very familiar ground, just a few minutes until Benningen from here.

A change in the weather had been forecast for Friday (10 April), and the day was indeed wet, chilly and grey. 

My trip to Offenburg did not go quite as planned; the long-distance high speed train I had booked for the second part of the trip was over an hour late. I got on a regional train instead, which meant arriving on time but also spending an hour without a proper seat, squeezed in with way too many other passengers, some of them (as usual on such packed trains on Friday evenings) imposing their noisy conversations and/or unpleasant body odours on the others. But I survived, and was just very relieved to finally get off the train in Offenburg, where O.K. was waiting for me.

Saturday (11 April) was supposed to be the warmest day of the week, and at about 22C/72F that was certainly true. For the first time this year, I dared wearing shorts and a short-sleeved top, and the sun felt so good on my bare legs and arms during the walk O.K. and I had in the afternoon.

By 5:00 pm, together with O.K.'s Mum, we were at his sister's; she and her husband had invited us to the first family BBQ of this season. We enjoyed that very much but eventually had to retreat indoors, because a chilly wind brought rain, as had been forecast.

That rain was of course welcome to everything that wants to grow right now, and it lasted all night.

It kept raining or at least drizzling on and off most of Sunday (12 April), but that did not deter us from driving the short distance to the historic town of Gengenbach, for a walk as well as to see an exhibition one of our neighbours had told us about.

Although I'd been to Gengenbach before, we'd not visited the monastery's garden before, and I found that quite beautiful.

in the middle of Gengenbach

near the monastery garden

Ein Engel für Mama

monastery garden

camellia

old (restored) tower, part of the wall that originally enclosed the town as well as the monastery. It is closed to the public, but I would so love to go inside and look out from the windows at the top!

chapel on the hill above the vineyards

close up of the chapel; we went inside, too, but there were people praying and I did not want to take photos

lilac in bloom

Gengenbach

The exhibition was impressive and thought-provoking: 

Tom Hegen, a photographer specialised on aerial views by using a drone for his camera (he pioneered that technique), showed part of his work making obvious how man's activities have changed the face of our beautiful planet forever - and definitely not for the better (I think we can all agree on that). Some of it is really scary to know, and the contrast between the aesthetics of some of the photos and what catastrophic effects you are actually looking at couldn't be bigger.

Please have a look at his website (in English) to learn about him and his important work.

We had coffee and cake at home after that and spent the rest of the afternoon at the cottage. The week ended with us watching a kitschy romance on TV while eating a delicious meal cooked by O.K.