“The Lure of the Open Road. Wartime wandering through the Eastern states by bicycle, truck, and riverboat 1944. By Thelma Popp Jones, 2007.”
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Thelma Popp Jones’ account of the adventures she and her friend Doris Roy enjoyed riding their bikes from New York to the Ohio and the Mississippi rivers and working as maids on a boat. (There’s a map and lots of photos, too.)
Link via Ask MetaFilter: A Vintage Bicycle Tour.
Ausgabe 31/2011
Westkanada: Der heilige Bär. “Für Westkanadas Indianer war der weiße Schwarzbär ein “Geisterbär”. Niemand durfte ihn jagen. Jetzt braucht das seltene Tier Schutz vor der Zerstörung seines Urwalds.” Von Bruce Barcott.
Digitale Grundschule: Guten Morgen, Herr Rechner! “Kinder können am Computer Jets steuern, die Bundesliga managen, Zivilisationen aufbauen. Könnten sie so nicht auch Grammatik und Rechnen lernen? Eine Reise zur digitalen Grundschule der Zukunft.” Von Jürgen von Rutenberg.
Lonely Planet Blog:
How not to behave on an airplane: a passengers’ bill of rights.
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):
Today at 1:43 pm an earthquake happened in the middle of one of my physics lessons. The students didn’t quite know what to make of the shaking and vibration they felt and asked me what had just happened. I said I thought it felt like an earthquake. I was able to look it up during the break between the 7th and 8th period. It turned out to be the biggest earthquake in the area for two and a half years: 4.4 on the Richter scale. The epicentre was about 15 km from my school.
Everyone talked about the earthquake for the rest of the day. One of my colleagues said it was the first earthquake he’d ever experienced, which quite surprised me because I have only been living here for the past 14 years and have felt at least three quakes I’ve posted about plus one I mentioned and another I clearly remember because someone told me they had dreamed the books in their shelf had danced – only to learn that it had not been a dream.
Two stories about missed earthquakes: I spent five weeks at a highschool in Hesperia, CA in 1992 and had wondered about earthquakes before going. Of course, there was an earthquake in Hesperia during those five weeks – it happened in the few days we spent in San Francisco, so we didn’t feel it. And on the day after we returned to Hesperia, there was one in San Francisco.
Earthquakes are rare occurences in Northern Germany, so I never experienced one while growing up. One of the very few quakes there occured on October 20, 2004 only about 10 km from my parents’ house. Of course, they happened to be visiting us on that day, so they missed it as well…
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