Bea´s Playground

Me, still at the foot of the "Ocean of Rocks", aka Bea´s Playground ;-)

These past days I have been "on the road" a lot. On thursday afternoon I took the train to Böblingen (near Stuttgart), where my dearest had written his tax advisor´s exams. He was still very tired and a little beside himself when I arrived.
But on friday he was feeling a better already and ready to drive home again. But before we did that, we went to a small town nearby, where my grandparents on my father´s side had lived until I was about twelve years old. It was strange to see that place again... The house is placed on the edge of town, and when I was little, a shepherd and his flock of sheep often stopped by in the evenings on the meadow next to that house. Now, the meadow is gone and new houses have been built there. Even my favorite climbing tree seems to be gone...Well, we walked around a little bit and I found the indoor pool again, where I used to go a lot and even earned some swimmer´s badges as a kid. I always loved to go swimming! After talking to some of the neighbors, we got in the car again and drove home. We chose to take a beautiful route through the black forest, as we had the most beautiful sunny fall weather you can imagine. I think, it took us at least four times as long as by driving back on the autobahn. But we enjoyed it so much. And this way we did not get stuck in the usual friday afternoon traffic jams and were back on time to go to an Ornette Coleman jazz concert in Ludwigshafen. We had a really great time!
On saturday we were both dead tired, but went to the city center anyway and did some shopping and hung around in the coffebar of one of our favorite bookstores. An ideal people watching place! ;-)
Yesterday, as the weather was still sooo beautiful, we decided to finally go to the place in the Odenwald (the region north of Heidelberg), called the "Ocean of Rocks". I have never seen anything like that. It is a very, very long slope of rocks, right in the middle of the forest. In past times there have been eightteen of those going down the hill! But many of those stones have been used for building churches and whatever in cities like Mainz or Trier. You can still see some stones that have been worked on by the old romans... Well, now it´s a huge playground, especially for young families. They all climb up the long, long slope with their excited children. And while most of the adults are panting and sweating, the little ones jump from rock to rock like mountain goats, some even seemed like little tarzans to us :-) And it was LOUD! Sounded like being at an overfilled outdoor pool in the summer time! It was sooo much fun! And the kid´s are sooo funny sometimes:
Little Girl:"Dad, I´m very fast!"
Dad:"How come you think so?"
Girl:"Because you can hardly keep up with me!"
:0))

This was not even half way up at a narrow part of the rocky slope. Higher on, the rocks got a lot larger than here.

Reichenbach in the Odenwald (Wald means forest)

The sun was sooo bright, I had to squint my eyes