Happy Haloween

Hallo Welt! Another week in Freiburg, mostly rainy and cold...we had snow in the mountains yesterday! Too soon for me.
I have some new photos from last weekend..it was really nice weather and we travelled to Gisi's hometown of Ehingen, to prepare her parents grave for All Saints/Souls Day, which is a national holiday here. We drove through some beautiful areas, the Donau Valley in particular. The Donau is the German name for the Danube river, and it starts in the Black Forest and heads east. There are some great cliffs, and we saw climbers scaling the vertical face walls of some of these. Out that way is mostly farming villages, and they were preparing the fields for the winter (plowing and spraying pig manure, not a nice odor!). We saw some new crops coming up, and wondered what grows during this time. Winter wheat maybe? As we headed east, we came across a lot of fog, as it was a somewhat warm day after a very cool evening..it made the light very eerie..see in the pix.
On Sunday, we stayed a bit closer to home, and went to the town of St. Ulrich in the Schwarzwald, about 15 minutes from here. It is so nice to be able to travel such a short distance and be transported to a completely different enviroment. All mountains and pastures, cows, goats...there are some nice photos from the day posted.
We attempted to go to dinner at a Straussen..which is a seasonal type of restaurant that farmers do during the spring and fall harvest time. You know where they are by the straw brooms hung outside. They are usually in an older building or farmhouse, and not really a professional restaurant..seems like the whole family helps out cooking and serving. They tend to have a limited menu, featuring regional specialties, or possibly thier own livestock and game, vegetables from the harvest. Apparently they are very popular, as we could not find a seat at several during the time we went, about 7pm. We will try again this weekend, a little earlier.
We did have a nice game dinner though at an old Restaurant in Kirchhofen, The Krone. I had Hase (rabbitt) and Gisi had Hirsch (deer), and it was really good on a cold night. There were only about 5 tables occupied, so we had great service and we were offered second helpings if we wanted (we didn't accept!), they feed you well in most restaurants here.
I was able to borrow a guitar finally, it's nice to be able to play a little and keep in practise. (check out the picture of the mystery Telecaster) I miss playing with the boys in the band. Hopefully I will write some new songs while I'm here.
Well I need to do some grocery shoping today, since tomorrow is a national holiday and everything will be closed. And everything is closed every Sunday...no mall cruising here!
I just hope it stops raining for a while, not really fun riding a bike with bags of groceries in the rain!
By the way, how's the election campaigning going? I bet it's getting crazy...I have only limited access to TV coverage here. I think that may be a good thing. I voted last week, hope you do too. I will be looking forward to the outcome, it will be 3 in the morning when they probably will call the results...I may have to stay up. Bye for now.....

Happy Birthday to my sister Laura today!!!!!! Many, Many More!!!!

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