A curious look – but what’s the connection to my past and my future?
This valley in the Odenwald has been a favourite spot for family outings for almost 150 years. The deer come to the fences to be fed, then and now.
The young deer at the top might very well be the grandgrandgrandgrand… son of the deer my granddad was feeding in the photo on the left, taken in around 1962. The photo on the right is of our son and grandson standing in more or less the same location earlier this year. I haven’t been to that place in the intervening 60 years.
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: It’s a Small World – I found this really small world on a my bike ride today. It seems to be part of a “planet ramble” (Planetenweg) with various planets displayed like this (Planetenweg). This is a representation of Neptune. A small, small world – only 57 times the size of our earth.
This renaissance castle is situated in the centre of the small town of Hadamar in Hesse. The most striking feature for me is the contrasts between the white walls and the sandstone trimmings.
WWW = Weinheim, Wachenburg, Windeck. Weinheim is a town of 45,000 inhabitants in the Rhein-Neckar-Metropolregion, i.e. it’s in a triangle with Heidelberg and Mannheim in the Upper Rhine Valley. I like this shot because it spans so much history. In the foreground is the old industrial area, the building on the right is part of the old tramway station, and towering above is the castle ruin Windeck where once the lords sent from the Abbey Lorsch reigned over the area.
A more typical shot of the historic sites – from left to right: the Wachenburg (about 100 years old), the Windeck(about 1000 years), and the Blaue Hut (somewhere in between in age).
The Blaue Hut is one of three remaining towers that were part of the medieval town fortifications.
The Rote Turm, so called because of the reddish sandstone features (or possibly some other reason which I did not understand), and the Hexenturm, or witches tower which as far as we can tell never housed any witches.
There is a third castle in Weinheim despite the name Zwei-Burgen-Stadt, or two castle town, and it’s the Schloss. Rather more like a small palace than a rustic castle it used to be the home of various noble families throughout the years and today houses the municipal administration. The park is open to the public but was still private property and only opened once a year at Easter when my father was a little boy.
A final view of a section of the old part of Weinheim including the street I grew up if not the house.
The house is actually in this winterey shot, and now it is not the half-timbered house in the centre.
I hope you enjoyed these glimpses of my hometown. There are always views turning up amongst my photos.
The small river running through our town and rushing and sometimes trundling towards the big river Rhine is split through canalisation into Old Weschnitz and New Weschnitz and various trenches dug for irrigation of the very fertile soil in the Upper Rhine Valley. Close to the town of Lorsch an island has been formed, called Weschnitz Insel which is kept as a nature reserve.
One both sides of the valley are the hills of the Odenwald in the east, the Pfälzer Wald in the west, creating horizontal borders.
Horizontal lines created by the greener gras where water veins are.
One house in Großsachsen, part of the double community of Hirschberg, with lots of grills in front of its windows. The last photo is not really a window but the door is part of the house, isn’t it.
With curtains, without curtains, with shutters, without shutters, with flower pots, without flower pots, bay windows, single windows, twin windows, with chicken, without chicken.
The Deutsches Eck (“German Corner”) is the place where the Moselle river flows into the Rhine. In the photo on the bottom is the water of the Rhine, above it the water from the Moselle. The different colours (due to different sediments, different weather, etc.) show that it takes a while for the two rivers to coalesce.
And now lets mix Rhine wine and wine from the Moselle and see what happens…
pictures imperfect blog 