30 days 30 photos (day 3)

Karl is still home sick...but he was well enough today to play with his Legos...

adventures with the girls in riquewihr

When the girls were here visiting we spent a day in the Alsace region of France, just over the border of Germany. Alsace is an unique area of France. Over the centuries it has gone back and forth between being a part of Germany and France. A lot of the local architecture and culture has more in common with Germany than France, the local dialect sounds more like German than French, and many of the town names are German.

We visited a tiny but very old medieval town called Riquewihr that hasn't changed much at all for centuries. It's so charming you'd want to throw up except that it's just so charming!



My nieces in Riquewihr.: Hannah, Kayla and Danielle.



I mean really, really charming!!

30 days 30 photos (day 2)

Yesterday, while Karl and I took our stroll, we stopped in the flower shop and I couldn't help but come away with a few pretty blossoms. And they are the subject of my photos for the day.

adventures with the girls!

Our Easter week was so so lovely!! And...as promised...here is the first post of what will be five posts about all of our adventures over the Easter holiday!

So...Karl's oldest sister, Diana, arrived on Wednesday, March 19, with her three oldest daughters (Danielle, Kayla, and Hannah) to spend a week with us. It was their first visit to us here in Germany, and their first visit anywhere outside the US and we had tons o' fun!! The only bad part of their visit, and really the only bad part, was the icky weather. We have very mild winters in this part of Germany but the last of the winter said goodbye with a vengeance that week with a snowfall, a lot of rain and too much cold!

We, of course, took them on a walk around our town of Bühl and our little village of Oberweier on the day they arrived.



Hannah, Kayla, Diana, Danielle in Bühl!



Hannah and Karl entering the little Oberweier chapel.

We hopped over the border and spent a day in the Alsace region of France including in city of Strasbourg, France where we visited the huge Gothic cathedral!



Danielle and the Strasbourg cathedral.

On Good Friday, Karl took his sister and nieces to the charming Black Forest town of Gengenbach (the home of Augustus Gloop) and then to the see the Opera in Freiburg. (Our Hannah is a very talented aspiring Opera singer!)

Kayla, Danielle, Hannah and Diana in Gengenbach.

Hannah at the Freiburg Opera House.

On Easter Sunday we went to our church in Karlsruhe then had lunch at the pretty restaurant in the horticultural gardens at the beautiful Karlsruhe Palace. (Our waitress in the restaurant took a particular liking to so many pretty American girls and chatted with us quite a bit then gave us all colored Easter eggs when we left!)



Diana, Kayla, Danielle and Hannah at the Karlsruhe Palace on Easter Sunday.

And on the Monday after Easter, us girls left my husband at home and took the speed train to Paris! For two days I took them to my favorite Paris sights!



Your Humble Narrator before the graceful Eiffel Tower.

But we also did so much more...so much that I've got four more posts in the works with many many photos!

30 days 30 photos (or more)

Orange Flower is a blog I love to read (and if you don't already read it go take a look and I'll bet you'll become a fan, too!) and when I read it this morning I was happy to see a fun challenge she's started for the month of April.

Orange Flower is hosting a 30 Days 30 Photos challenge asking anyone who's interested to post a photo a day for the month of April that they took with the macro setting on their camera. And I decided to jump on the bandwagon and take some up-close photos myself!

And if any of you are interested on joining us on the bandwagon, you can jump on any time this month! Or if you just want to check out all the cool photos everyone is creating, then see the list of participating blogs here.



To start off this April challenge, Karl and I went for a stroll today through our little village of Oberweier. Ever since our visiting family left us last Wednesday, we've been sick. We had a wonderful week of fun and adventures followed by a miserable week of sore throats, sore bodies, and fevers. I'm back on the mend, but Karl is still pretty miserable. Today, however, partly because he got cabin fever, partly becuase the weather has finally turned back into Spring again, and partly because he actually started to feel a little better, we took a stroll. And I took some photos. But I had a hard time picking just 1 photo for my day 1 of the 30 day challenge, so here are 3 to kick off a month of what already looks like is going to be filled with more than 30 photos!

The mouth of the faucet at the water trough in front of the village's little chapel:



A broken candelabra we found on the ground:



The fresh-baked bread for sale at the self-serve stand (we left money for that top loaf and are munching on it now...sooooo yuuuummmmy!):

architectural walk

This morning I met with some other women from my church and one of them took us on a little historical walk through her neighborhood in the city of Karlsruhe. The area was filled with old, big, beautiful homes and many built in the Art Nouveau style.







She showed us some specific homes where prominent Karlsruhe citizens lived in the early twentieth century who were taken from their beautiful homes and stripped of their positions and killed during the 1930s and 1940s because they were Jewish. Some of the homes had little plaques in the cobblestones sidewalk outside the home with the names of those Jewish families who died during the War.



It was really interesting, a lovely morning for a walk, and the homes were so pretty!

favorite shop friday: black bags

I've been keeping my eye out for a new bag. I don't think I've found quite the right bag yet (isn't finding the right bag or purse such a personal thing?)...but today's featured shop just might have it...Black Bags!



Black Bags have beautiful and cool bags in just the size I'm looking for: big enough for me to carry all that "just-in-case" junk in my bag I've convinced myself I need as well as a few of those extras I like to have on hand, like a water bottle or dictionary, when I spend a couple of days in Paris or take a long train ride to Karlsruhe to shop....but not so big that I feel like I'm hauling luggage everywhere!

But there are really two reasons I think this shop is worth showing off to you today: quality and style!

Leslie of Black Bags hand-makes a very professional looking bag! Her handbags and her shoulder bags have a nickel magnetic snap closure, three exterior pockets and three interior pockets as well as a hanging key fob...and I so need that! It's a miracle sometimes that I can find my keys in my bag!





In fact, if you do have the tendency that I have to loose your keys in whatever bag you have you can buy some very good-looking key fobs from Leslie:



But maybe my favorite part of her bags are the very cool and very beautiful fabrics she uses...she truly makes a bag for every kind of person!







I can't decide if I'm more of a paint-by-number or a chocolate mint sprig kind of girl:





Go pick out your favorite Black Bag at http://blackbags.etsy.com!