Rainy days

Yesterday I made plans to go out hiking the trail from Aesch to Ettingen again with a friend. This morning we woke up to a gray drizzly day, but I had been so looking forward to another wander in the woods that I decided I wanted to go anyway. "Bring your umbrella!" she said. This time I also had freshly charged batteries in my camera, so I was able to take some nice photos.

We met up and hopped on the 11 tram out to Aesch, and headed off into the drizzle. As we walked through Aesch we passed a big group of people who looked like they had just gotten back from a hike in the woods themselves, all with unfurled umbrellas. One elderly gentleman at the back end of the group looked at us with concern and said something which I would have to guess was something like "Where are your umbrellas?!" since I don't understand much German yet. Not long after that we broke out our umbrellas. The rain was coming down just hard enough that we were getting rather damp without them.

Here are some views along the trail. There is a little birdhouse you can see in the first one, in the tree to the right of the trail. We saw quite a few of these scattered around in the trees.



Most of the leaves have fallen now, but these few still hanging on looked very brilliant against the hazy hills. There were quite a few of these rocky outcroppings in amongst the trees. It looks like this was one of the areas that had been trimmed back at some point, and the rock really stood out.


Here is one example of the huge long wood stacks that are out along some of the trails.


Here is a view as we came down out of the hills and headed toward Ettingen where we caught the tram back to Basel.


We saw this group of young kids out on an expedition to get a Christmas tree. You can see the tree being carried along upside down by one of their chaperones in the middle-front of the group.


This was a farm right outside the town where we saw some sheep, a couple of horses, and a big John Deere tractor. For some reason I didn't realize they were international. There was also a shed further in toward town with some old (possibly antique) farm tools hanging off it, though I suspect they were just for decoration.







The clock is broken! I thought this was a neat little sundial, and it even has a chart detailing the amount of discrepancy to account for depending on what time of year it is. Of course, it doesn't work well when it's cloudy out.