First hike of the year

_{The Nideck waterfall. The chateau's on top of the waterfall, which is appropriately fairy-tale-esque}

I feel like I’ve been hibernating for the last several months – I’ve barely been on my bike except to go to French class in months, my last major outing was in December, while the last one before that was early November.

This weekend was almost sunny, and actually warm – thirteen degrees! The birds were singing from every tree, the streets were crowded with ghostly apparitions of winter-maddened Strasbourgers blinking in the first natural light to grace these parts in months; it finally felt like spring had sprung.

So it was with some delight that I accepted an invitation from our friend Lama to join her, Mirna and Irina on a hike in the Vosges. As always, I suspect the invitation was more for Amynah than me, but my beloved had work in her lab, so they had to settle for me.

Amynah thus spent Sunday afternoon under florescent lights, making science. Meanwhile, I was somewhere past Oberhaslach, lost and floundering through the muck and snow in the vicinity of the Chateau Nideck.


_{Lama insisted on taking a photo of me in the Chateau, and then backed as far away from me as possible to take it.}

I didn’t actually take a photo of said Chateau – all that was left of it was a restored tower and the remains of a lookout. I rather regret this now, as apparently Nideck is probably one of the few local castles that anyone outside of Alsace might have heard of, having featured in an extremely anti-climatic fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm about parasitic giants and their parenting difficulties.


_{This is the remains of a completely different castle in the same vicinity: "Look out attackers, or we'll drop a tower on you!}