Where we're at

Tanja, Clara, and I are staying with Tanja's parents in a village near the city of Stralsund, in Germany. Since I've been here the weather has been amazing! Just enough rain to keep things green, and mostly beautiful sunny days with the temperature in the mid 20's (huzzah for Celcius!). Here are some pictures of the village:

This is a "Radwanderkoje", a cottage that you can book to stay in if you are making a bicycle tour of the area. This part of Germany gets a lot of tourists in the summer, because it's very close to the Baltic sea, and the popular islands of Rügen and Hiddensee.

It's a pastoral village, which I think Clara will appreciate more next year. One of our neighbours keeps ducks in the yard (can you believe they were only hatched in April!), further along in the village are geese, goats, sheep, and cows. There's also a rooster around somewhere, although I haven't seen him yet.


The village is surrounded by farmland (most of the houses back onto farms), which is very nice for me! The landscape reminds me a bit of Alberta and Saskatchewan, except that there are much larger trees, and the horizon is a lot closer because the land slopes off into the sea!

The village doesn't have a beach, but it does have a spot where you can wade into the water to go swimming (also a small harbor with a boat club). If you zoom WAY in in the center of the photo above you can see the tower of Saint Mary's Church, which from 1625 to 1647 was the tallest building in the world. You can also see a few of the area's ubiquitous windmills.

Finally, here are two photos of Clara with her Opa. The first is at the access to the sea in the village, and second is on the pier in Stralsund. Clara loves to ride on the shoulders, hopefully we'll post a video of it soon.



I love that in that photo everything is slanted except Clara!