The Corona diaries – Week 2

Second week of curfew. For the first week, see here.

28 March 2020 (Saturday): Like Friday, Saturday came with awesome weather – Around 19 degrees Celsius and sunny. After a relatively slow morning, we went for a wonderful long hike that went through vineyards and forests near Würzburg. My husband plotted a circular route that comprised part of the Panoramaweg (Panorama route – through vineyards) and part of the Mainwanderweg (Main hiking trail – the Main is the river in the area). It was a good workout. My Fitbit says I did 12.5km, and there were quite a lot of hills. Not bad for a walk in the last month of pregnancy. There were no crowds; occasionally we passed other walkers or mountain bikers, at a safe distance. Most of the time we were completely alone. Continue reading

In the time of Corona

These are strange times.

I had planned other posts, but it feels impossible to continue with these and ignore the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, although I am compulsively reading about the coronavirus at the moment, I am also getting tired of hearing about it to the exclusion of everything else. The World Health Organization (WHO) actually recommends not checking the coronavirus news more than twice a day, to avoid stress and anxiety. So, expect posts about other things in the next weeks too. But for now, I’ll summarize our experience of the pandemic so far. Continue reading

Franconian Kreuzberg and the ruins of Osterburg

In January, following our tradition of exploring the hills, we set off for our first hiking outing in  Lower Franconia, the region of Bavaria in which Würzburg is situated. A quick search on Komoot showed us that there are a lot of interesting hikes within about a 60-90 minutes radius of Würzburg. For our first trip, Kreuzberg got the nod because 1) it has a monastery with a brewery (Husband’s Choice) 2) it has the same name as a Berlin suburb and we were curious to see “the other Kreuzberg” and 3) it is the highest of the Rhön mountains (928m) in the Bavaria, and is known as “The Sacred Mountain of the Franconians”. Continue reading

Würzburg: A rough start

In the middle of November, my husband and I moved from Berlin to Würzburg to start our new jobs. I’d be lying if I said everything went smoothly and we adjusted easily to our new home.

Once you’ve been living in a place for a while, it’s interesting to go back and remember how you felt when you first moved there. For this reason, I kept a record of our first month in Würzburg. In future I’ll go back to more travel-oriented blog posts. Continue reading

Life Update

This year I haven’t written many blog posts. I suppose there are many reasons why blogs suddenly go quiet. In my case, it wasn’t for lack of things to write about. We went on several exciting trips that I haven’t yet managed to post about (India last year in December, Iceland in March, Mauritius in November) and locally, we went on a lot of weekend or day trips within Germany or over the Czech border. So why the radio silence?

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Easter weekend cycling from Havelberg to Waren (Müritz)

Easter came fairly late this year, and was warmer than usual, with sunshine and temperatures of about 20 degrees Celsius in our region of Germany. Over the 4-day Easter weekend, we spent two days doing a section of the Elbe Cycle path from Magdeburg to Havelberg, before aiming to join the Elbe-Müritz Cycle path (Elbe-Müritz Radweg) for the final two days. Where I last finished off, we’d just headed to bed in our tents at the campsite on the island in the Havel river at Havelberg, having enjoyed sitting around an Easter fire, a German Easter tradition.

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