A dodgy back street in Liverpool:
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We spent the day in the Black Forest on a short (7km but quite a few Höhenmeter) hike with friends that includes a portion of Klettersteig (apparently in all other languages this is known as via ferrata). The hike is called Karlsruher Grat even though it is 45 min drive from here:
There is a number of small waterfalls on the way up to the ridge which are quite beautiful and have extremely clear water flowing through a number of rocky „bath tubs“
We‘ve been there before it is one of the best hikes in the whole area. I am glad we went early. When we returned to the car around 2pm the cars were parked down the street for several hundred meters.
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My husband and I just returned from a Disney cruise vacation. We booked it back in April or so, when we were fully vaccinated and we thought things were really looking up. Then vaccine rates in the US stalled, the Delta variant of Covid began to spread, and we had our doubts about going through with it. We ultimately decided the protocols in place were sufficient for our family of 2 fully vaccinated adults. We would not have done it with an unvaccinated child in tow, but lots of others did.
The view from our stateroom veranda for two days of the cruise, when we were at Disney’s private island in the Bahamas.
A not great selfie of us after we had kayaked to the island in background, explored its sandbar and beach for a bit, then kayaked back.
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I have so many questions. We’d never do a cruise because my wife gets seasick in the bath. How Disney is it? Is it lots of characters and photo ops? Do they change day to day?
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It can be as Disney as you want it to be (or you can sort of ignore the Disney but there’s probably cheaper cruise lines if you want to do that). There are characters around but you can easily avoid them if characters aren’t your thing. Pre-Covid it was pretty much set times and places to interact with characters and it could include hugs, autographs, etc. Now, there were some set times but also the characters would just show up randomly a lot more, walking around the pool area or playing beach volleyball on the island or whatever and were always behind a rope or with a spot marked (blue circle on the floor) as the closest you were supposed to get to take your photos and interact with them. You were close enough you could still talk at the masked body suit characters and get mimed reactions from them or have conversations with the more human characters, but no hugs or autographs for now.
Characters were the Excellent Eight (for anyone not familiar with Disney groupings like Fab Five, Sensational Six, and aforementioned E. E. that’s Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, Pluto, Donald, Daisy, Chip, and Dale); Stitch; and some Princesses (Ariel, Tiana, Belle, and I don’t remember what other one or two). I think Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean might have also been around on the island and on the one pirate themed night on ship, but I didn’t see him. They all have different outfits and some people try to make sure to get pictures with their favorite in every outfit. I definitely saw sailing themed, pirate night outfits, formal wear, and beach swim wear (on the island) for each of the Eight on this trip and the princesses each had at least two of their movie outfits that they wore at different times, typically a less formal during the day and more formal in the evening (like Belle’s blue dress with white apron versus the gold/yellow ball gown).
Please ignore that I’m an absolute mess as I literally got off a water slide and walked straight into a Mickey and Pluto photo opportunity.
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Just amazing!
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Awesome. Stitch has been out favourite character meet in Orlando.
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As I may have mentioned, we are currently traveling. Right now 3 nights in “Lüneburger Heide” and tomorrow we go on to visit family in Hamburg. On our way up here we could see Quedlinburg in the distance (not quite but kind of) in any way
we had a good laugh when we came upon this sign today.
The heath flowering is just about over so we didn’t get all the colors. Originally we were going to go about 3 weeks earlier which would have meant it was in full bloom. Ah well, next time?
Today we visited Celle a beautiful old town with the most amazing number of Fachwerkhäuser.
Our hotel is in the typical local style with the red Klinker. It is an old farm/estate consisting of at least a dozen buildings.
We always said we were not traveling in Germany much to keep that for when we couldn’t travel elsewhere—we mostly meant when we were older… I’ve been to this particular region the last time when I was a teenager (Hamburg I have been more recently b/c family)
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As an addendum to my previous post now that we are back home: Here’s a small photo album from the assorted parts of our trip to Northern Germany: https://lightroom.adobe.com/shares/c19b3d24db3c4ccc9cabc63b1df708a8
And a couple of teaser images:
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Wow, amazing pictures! So many great ones. I love the old buildings; and I particularly enjoy half-timbered buildings.
But I think my favorite picture has to be #12.
It looks like it was a fantastic trip.
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You know I wanted to answer that I was proud of the post-processing on this one. But I ended up chosing the one I took with my phone over my “actual” camera (I have a Sony Rx100VI that I currently take on to trips when I am too lazy to take the DSLR) so most of that picture is courtesy fancy google automatic processing 
I did use Lightroom though to make it pop even more. Taking pictures with the sun straight ahead is always a gamble.
So “half-timbered” is the word. We call it “Fachwerkhaus”.
It was a really good trip much more like we usually travel than our previous pandemic trips. We started in the southern most part of Lüneburger Heide, from there to Celle, Hamburg and Lübeck and then along the northern coast to Norderney. On the way back we stopped in Osnabrück and Mülheim. The half-timbered houses are in Celle and the final set of houses is Osnabrück. No pics from Hamburg or Mülheim (which is where we stay when visiting SPIEL) because those were family visits and Lübeck was the night-time pics and the fancy dinner with my uncle.
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Some excellent skies in northern Germany!
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A couple of days ago we had this:
but in spite of the warning of a Snowpocalypse in the home counties I haven’t seen any sign of it.
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Despite 5C temperatures here, we saw these on a shopping trip for warmer kake-futon for the kids:
(About 6 metres tall)
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Was like, “oh, nice flowers” then saw
About 6 metres tall
Wait, what? 
They look like something in a flower pot, taken close up… We don’t even have trees that tall here in Colorado, much less anything nice!
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6 metres is not that unusual for trees, surely? But yeah, these really towered over us. At head height they look a lot like a bamboo grove.
Pretty sure they are Dahlia Imperialis, which can apparently grow to 10 metres, and are native to high altitudes, which probably explains the low temperature blooming.
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