The new adventure season begins

After a full semester, we arrived back in Freiburg at the beginning of May.  (To recap, we have been spending the summers in Freiburg for the last few years.  Andreas is working on a joint research project, bringing samples of trees that have been killed by the pine beetle infestation to the lab in Freiburg for an analysis.  This year, I am also working with the writing centre at the University of Education here.)

Since my last post in January, we have renovated and moved into our new apartment in Edmonton as first-time property owners. This was an easy move in some ways as we just moved up two floors in our building. However, in the middle of January, Andreas woke up with half of his face paralyzed, a condition called Bell’s palsy.  This initially caused him a lot of pain, and certainly set us back in terms of energy and desire to do anything exciting this summer. (And he still has not recovered any movement in his face.) In other words, our plans for this summer in Freiburg are simple: go to the Biergarten, eat lots of gelato, go hiking and biking on the weekend, and do nothing that requires us to get up early.  Fortunately, there is no end to the adventures that can be had around here.

So, first up.  Andreas’ cousin Claudia and her family came to visit us in Freiburg, and we got our first hike in.  We hiked the Wutachschlucht, one of the more famous hikes in the Black Forest.  We’ve done this hike before (photos here), but we were happy to tackle it again, especially with Linus, Lasse, and Mara (Claudia’s kids), as they seem to come up with the most amazing ideas. This time Lasse hiked a good while with a dead tree attached to his back.

On the following day, we hit the Todtnauer waterfall and zoomed down the Rodelbahn in Todtnau.  Big hit with the kids, of course.

The kids got a hold of our camera at one point.  Should be obvious which photos they took!