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.

Read in 2026 - 10: The Blackmail Man

The Blackmail Man

Stephen Hudgell

A book hardly worth my attention and time – but still I persisted to the end, because strangely enough I began to care for one of the main characters, and for a while it wasn’t clear where the story was heading, and I was curious as to how it would play out.

 

Ginger is a convicted criminal just released from prison who has nothing better to do than plan for more crimes. This time, he is certain to make his plan work and yield enough money to leave the UK once and for all, to spend the rest of his life on some tropical island with all the booze and female company he wants.

Quite by chance, he meets Frank, CEO of a local company. Over a pint they start talking, and convinced that Ginger is determined to live straight after having served his sentence, Frank offers him a job.

Unfortunately, things don’t go as intended, and Ginger swears revenge.

 

He now turns his hand to blackmail, and when his victim threatens to expose him, murder is his obvious next step.

 

Frank, who has been enlisted by the victim to help get to the bottom of the blackmailing, can’t let Ginger get away with the money AND murder.

He unwillingly teams up with a friend, but Ginger isn’t outwitted so easily…

 

What kept me reading on was curiosity where the events were leading and wanting to see Frank come out of it all without too much harm.

The basic idea of the story was interesting enough: Can a perfectly upright person, trusted husband and father, loyal employee and hard worker, become involved in criminal activities but still fight for their values?

Can a criminal be truly bad to the core, with nothing kind about him at all?

 

From the perspective of following through with these ideas, the book wasn’t a total waste. But the writing was so bad and full of errors that I really was tempted more than once to just leave it.

It wasn’t overly long and kept me sort of entertained during several trips to and from work, and of course I did not spend any money on this free ebook from the kindle store.

It was my first and will remain my only read by this writer. I couldn't find much information about him, but there are several books by him available from Amazon. Hopefully (for him), this was a starter and his writing (and whoever has done the editing!) has improved since.

Easter Week

Last week was still on the chilly side, it was often VERY windy and there was a bit of rain in between - in short, it felt pretty much like April, which indeed it was from Wednesday onwards.

On Monday (30 March) we had rain followed by sunshine and there was even thunder at one point, although it never got any warmer than 8C/46F. I worked from home, and at about 4:30 pm I left for my usual walk to Benningen.

Tuesday (31 March) was wet, cold and grey, but that didn't stop me from walking to Pattonville after work, and as you can see in the pictures, the sky had cleared up nicely by then. 

I'd not been there in a few months, and almost on the spot when I returned home it started to rain again, holding off long enough for me to be out for a couple of hours.

My regular day at the office followed on Wednesday (1st of April); again, it was cold and windy at first, but later the sun came out, and of course I couldn't let the opportunity of a good walk slip! I got off the train in Zuffenhausen and walked the rest from there, which was really good.

As always on the Thursday before Easter (called Gründonnerstag in German, literally meaning "Green Thursday"), my Mum made a big batch of traditional Maultaschen (click here to see what they are) and a smaller vegetarian batch. After work, my sister and I met at our Mum's, and Mum's friend R and her brother who live in the same house joined us for a delicious meal of freshly cooked Maultaschen, lettuce and spuds salad.

Good Friday is a public holiday in Germany, and I deliberately kept it entirely free of any appointments. After doing my usual cleaning in the morning, I had something to eat and a short rest before I left a little after 2:00 pm for a walk I had not done in years - 5 1/2, to be precise! My 2020 post of that walk is here, and the one before from 2012 is here.

Out of curiosity, I started the Runmeter app on my phone, and it recorded a total of about 19.2 km / 12 miles. I was out for just under 3.5 hours with a very short break at the "Kaiser", drinking from my water bottle and eating a peanut bar for sustenance. 

Water reservoir

The "Kaiser" hides in this small group of trees.

Here it is; a man-made monument made to look like a natural piece of rock, commemorating the exact place where Kaiser Wilhelm once stood at a military inspection.

My view from the bench by the Kaiser

Spring seems strangely behind at this spot, compared to the rest of my walk.

I saw several herons and falcons and heard larks for most of the walk.

It felt truly good but I was glad to be home - a longer break would have made sense, but at the time I didn't want it.

Getting to Offenburg on Saturday (4th of April) involved 3 changes instead of one, and took close to 4 hours instead of two, all because of construction works around Offenburg train station, with no trains stopping there. Instead, everybody had to get off the train and get on a bus for the last 20 km to the city, where O.K. picked me up for the last leg of my journey, the short drive to the village.

We had coffee & cake and then set to prepare tomorrow's family meal, leg of lamb and vegetables all cooked in white wine for almost 5 hours in the oven. In between getting it all ready to go in the oven and putting the finishing touches to the sauce we went for a short walk and had something to eat.

Easter Sunday saw us getting the table and everything else ready for noon, when O.K.'s mother, his sister and her husband arrived. For starters, we had sparkling wine and fillet of smoked trout with horseradish cream and a leafy salad, followed by the lamb and veg. For dessert, there was a choice of three different flavours of ice cream.

Unbelievably, not all that long afterwards we still managed to have the raspberry cream cake O.K.'s Mum had made (from the raspberries she grows in her garden) with our coffee!

We then walked to the cemetery and back, stopping for chats with some neighbours along the way. 

Eventually, our guests went home and O.K. and I did the usual cleaning and putting things back to normal - hardly surprising, we did not have anything more to eat until the next day.

At 20C/68F, it had been the warmest day in a while, and sunny throughout.

By O.K.'s Mum's house. Aren't these glorious?