Summer

It’s been about 2 weeks since we came back from a wonderful summer holiday in Germany. We stayed in a beautiful old town, Cochem, along the river Mosel. When we are on vacation I always like to stay in a place that has a garden or a balcony (preferably both!). This time we stayed in an apartment that had a nice balcony, with (among many other nice objects to look at) a view on the castle on the other side of the river.
We enjoyed walking about in the old town center of Cochem, and on the hills around the town. In the old center you’d see a lot of tourists, but as soon as you went for a walk in the hills, you’d almost never see another person there.

I think my favorite walk was the one where we ended up visiting the Winneburg, which is the ruin of an old castle that was destroyed by the French in 1689. The Winneburg ruin is only accessible by foot (at least for the last part of the way), so not a lot of people come to visit it. When we were there, we were all by ourselves, so we spent at least an hour exploring the ruin, individually, sometimes running into each other. It was so much fun, and I just kept thinking of Catherine Morland (the heroine of Jane Austen’s ‘Northanger Abbey’), she definitely would have loved this!

Of course I also went to look for a yarn shop in Cochem, and I soon found out that they do indeed have one (Kappes, ‘Zeit für Handabeit!’). I bought a skein of sock yarn there, so that I can knit myself a pair of Cochem socks. I also bought a kit for a table cloth embroidery project, and I started working on it right away, on that wonderful apartment balcony of ours.

The other project that I worked on in Cochem was a sweater for myself, made out of greenish Lang Estio. It’s a cotton/acrylic blend, so perfect for a summer sweater. I only had 9 skeins, so I made a sweater with ¾ length sleeves, and it was finished by the end of our 2-week vacation. Once the sweater was finished, I started designing another shawlette pattern (but more about that some other time).

I also enjoyed reading the 2 ‘local’ crime novels that I bought in Cochem’s bookshop. One of the crime novels is situated in Cochem, the other one (a ‘Wein Krimi’) is situated along the river Mosel in general. They are quite different from ‘Northanger Abbey’ but also fun to read!