Travelog for: Madam Miff

We have our Silvester Dinner now. It's fondue with minced meat and different sauces and some other little food like cornichons and more. It way yummy.

Finally it is time to welcome the New Year 2013. We watched the fireworks and our host's children made a special firework with sparklers for us. Then we went to bed, really tired.

On January 6th is Epiphany. Children go out as the three kings and collect money for church and special needs. Many people offer them sweets. That's why they also carry bags with them to put the sweets, chocolate and other things like apricots and appels in it. Here you see some of the sweets the sons and daughter of our host brought home on 5th January. (This year they went on 4th and 5th). Maybe they will share them with us, who knows.

Finally we have some snow, so we decided to go on a walk around the Kreuzbergsee in Tiefenbach. The lake was contured as recreational area in 1974 and it's magnitude is about 200.000 m². It is about 340 m long and 70 m broad.

The weather was so grey, that we had not really a chance to go out and see other places. It had snowed during the night - everything is white now. At least it isn't so dark outside now.

Today I joined my host on a trip to Blaustein. Her son studies at the university of Ulm and she visited him over the weekend. He has a nice view out of the window and today we had been really lucky, because the sun was shining.

Blaustein is a municipality in the district of Alb-Donau Baden-Württemberg in Germany. It is situated on the Blau River, 6 km west of Ulm and has about 15,000 inhabitants.

It was created in 1968 after the union of Ehrenstein and Klingenstein and some more municipalities joined.

It is home to one or more prehistoric pile-dwelling (or stilt house) settlements that are part of the Prehistoric Pile dwellings around the Alps UNESCO World Heritage Site.


View to Löwenfelsen in Ehrenstein




The river Blau really shimmers blue sometimes. The name comes from the celtic name Blava. The blue colour comes from light scattering due to the high chalky spring water. River Blau is a left tributary to the Danube.




It was so so cold, that we hurried home again after these two photos.

The next day we joined our host's son and her on the way to the university and after we said goodbye to him, we walked back home. The way was rather steep and I had a lot of fun on the icy way. But you can see, that the sky was grey again.






Back in Blaustein we walked through the Szeklertor, which is a present of the partner city Cernat in Romania. The Székelys derive their name from a Hungarian expression meaning "frontier guards" and were regarded as the finest warriors of medieval Transylvania, but it isn't completely proven.

Today I watched tv, because it was a special day. We followed the flight of former Pope Benedict XVI. out of the Vatican.

Wow! We have another sunny day! I really had no chance to see the flowers in the garden behind the house until now, because the weather was that bad. I can't remember, that we had springweather like this before. All flowers are blooming at the same time and the trees got leaves within minutes it seems.

We are on the way to Bad Wildbad, where our host's husband has an appointment. As the weather was so terrible again during the last weeks, we took the chance to take some photos today.

Today I'm on a sightseeing trip by car - the weather had been terrible during the last days, but today it is a little bit better.

Here you see one of Bruchsal's oldest streets: Württemberger-Straße.

Then we drove to Heidelsheim, which is one of Bruchsal's surburbs. Heidelsheim belongs to Bruchsal since 1974. The river Saalbach also flows through Heidelsheim. The small city was first named in 770 A.D.

We drove to Blaustein on the Autobahn. My hosts' one son lives in this town, which is close to Ulm. Here you see some impressions during our drive, which took about 2 hours one way. You still see thick clouds in the sky.

It seems, that sightseeing means to look out of windows or driving cars. The weather was too cold and we only had a little time in Blaustein before we had to drive back to Bruchsal again, so here you can see just a view over the roofs.