Tap, tap… this thing on?

Well, it’s been almost two months since I posted anything here… the login button almost felt rusty. I really should get back into the habit of posting something here more regularly.

My six weeks of summer vacation are almost over. André and I spent one week in the Black Forest hiking the Schluchtensteig, I visited friends and family and spent some time relaxing at home and working on a new patchwork project.

Here are a few photos from our trip (as usual, click for a bigger version on Flickr).

On our way to the start of the Schluchtensteig in Stühlingen we spent half a day at Lake Constance and visited the Pfahlbau–Museum.

We started our hike the next morning, mostly following the Wutach for the first three days. Here’s a photo of our descent on the second morning of our hike, near Blumberg:

And here’s a view of the Wutach in beautiful sunny weather.

We saw lots of interesting butterflies, among them many Silver-washed Fritillaries (Kaisermantel):

On the third day the weather was sunny and quite warm, but the forecast predicted lots of rain for the following day, so we decided to keep going for a little while longer until we reached the Schluchsee. This turned out to be a very good idea, because we got to enjoy this view:

We had bad thunderstorms with rain and even hail during the night and congratulated ourselves on our decision to keep going because the Schluchsee was barely visible the next day when you stood right on the shores of it. It rained a lot on the fourth day, but we only had an hour of light rain before we reached our next destination a little after lunchtime.

Fortunately, the rain only lasted for a day, and we were greeted by the sun on the fifth and sixth mornings, and the weather stayed nice for the remainder of our hike.

After spending the night in Wehr, our final destination, we took public transportation back to Stühlingen (quite a journey on a Saturday because the connections were less than optimal) and drove home. We had to take a little detour because of construction work and happened upon one of the train stations for the Sauschwänzlebahn (Wutachtalbahn, siehe auch Wutachtalbahn bei Wikipedia) where a train was just about to depart. We had seen the train on the first day of our hike so of course we had to stop and have a closer look. Here’s one of the historic steam engines which was built in 1942 (auf deutsch mehr Infos zur 50 2988 der Wutachtalbahn):