Spring Weekend

Last weekend was a mixed bag weather-wise. There a few showers, it was chilly at times, but Sunday was mild enough to leave the padded coat at home and wear an outdoor gilet over a long-sleeved top instead.

O.K. and I went for walks both on Saturday and Sunday. As my planned arrival on Saturday ended up almost 1 1/2 hours late, there wasn't that much time left for a longer walk. But we made up for that on the Sunday, getting 13.5 km under our belts.

It was looking like rain a few times, but whenever the sun came out, it felt really warm.

On Saturday afternoon, we went up on the hills behind the village, close to where O.K.'s parents have their allotment. I have at least one picture of this forsythia from previous years on my blog, but I can never resist when its yellow lights up the whole scene:

Not far from the forsythia is this large shrub/tree (when do you call a plant a shrub, and when is it a tree?). As you can see, the sky showed patches of blue:

I simply had to take a picture with all those spring colours together; pale pink, white, yellow, light green and blueish grey: 

The view from one of O.K.'s living room windows - this tree in the neighbours' garden has also featured on my blog before:

Our Sunday walk took us straight from the cottage (always good when it is not necessary to take the car) through the fields and through woodland (the Black Forest starts on the next row of hills behind the village) towards Diersburg, a neighbouring village to O.K.'s. We've been there before, several times; during one walk, we went to look at the ruins of Castle Diersburg (Burg means castle).
But not this time; we left the woods at a different end of the valley, among vineyards, and made our way down to the village from here.

Drystone walls with steps support the terraced vineyards:

It still looked like rain, but we didn't catch a single drop during our walk:

These flowers look like early summer already - but the picture was taken on the 8th of March. We spotted this unusual building - a water reservoir, we think - in one of the vineyards. Can you see the ceramic cat on top?

More spring:

Back home at the cottage, a piece of apple cake and coffee were very welcome!

I had to go home an hour earlier than usual; the train schedule was changed because of construction work on the tracks. That weekend, both my trips to and from O.K.'s were adventurous; as mentioned above, I was almost 1 1/2 hours late on arrival, because of a missed connection. I spent 3/4 of an hour having coffee and a snack at Costa Coffee at Karlsruhe main station (not that much of an adventure, admittedly).

On the trip home on Sunday, I was supposed to have 17 minutes to catch my connection in Stuttgart, for the last leg of the journey which takes only about 10 minutes. But although the train departed on time in Karlsruhe, it had two unplanned stops along the way: 
The first time, our train driver had to repair a door on the train. The second time, someone smoked in the toilet, which of course triggered an alarm, and the train driver had to come out of his driving compartment once again to sort it out.
That meant we were now 18 minutes late... you do the maths what that meant for my connection!
Luckily, though, my connecting train was still at the platform in Stuttgart. I grabbed my bag and sprinted from platform 14 to platform 6 in one minute, jumped on the train, the doors closed, and off we went. Phew!
But what does it show about the train company that it is the driver who has to do ALL the work, with no other staff for support?

Let me end this post with this view from my kitchen window on Monday night.