Barefoot Park

This past weekend the Primary in our ward had an activity for the 8-11 year olds (for activity days).  They went to a Barfusspfad (a barefoot park) in Bad Sobernheim.  Our family decided to tag along, as did a few others, and it was a lot of fun.   

During the past couple of decades, hundreds of these parks have opened up around Europe (mostly in Germany and Austria), with the idea that there are many benefits associated with walking barefoot. We pretty much go barefoot all the time in this family (except for Joe), so this was right up our alley.

The Bad Sobernheim park is about 2 miles long, and with a wide variety of walking surfaces (river stones, bark mulch, mud, logs, sand, etc.), your feet get a very long and stimulating massage....kind of ;)  There are also several kinds of balancing challenges, and we even forded through a river.  Lot of pictures.

Now, some of us have more tender feet than others, and this was fodder for an endless amount of comical comments.

"Oh, the things that people can get away with charging money for"

"What would you do for a Klondike Bar?  Not this."

"Different sizes of different kinds of rocks give you different kinds of pain. Who knew?"

"Which way is the short-cut?"

But really, we ALL had a good time! :)

You know, I can not see this kind of thing ever happening in America.  There are just too many regulations to ever get away with it.  Think of the injuries!  Think of the parasites!  Think of the lawsuit-happy patrons!

Wiesbaden Train Tour

Wiesbaden has this cute little train that you can ride around in to take a tour of the city.  It meets right outside of the tourist information office downtown.  FYI, it comes in both red and white.  We rode both, but I only got a picture of the white one.

We went with some friends of ours one day, and got to see and learn a few new things in the area. 

Wiesbaden, as one of the oldest spa towns towns in Europe, has hosted many famous and royal people, who came here on holiday to relax and gamble.  We saw the house where Johannes Brahms stayed while he wrote his Symphony No. 3 in F major (which he once referred to as his Wiesbaden symphony). And we saw the home where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe stayed for a few summers.  We went passed the Kurhaus (pictured below), where the Russian author, Dostoyevsky, was said to have lost all his traveling money in the casino, which then inspired his novel "The Gambler".

We got off the train when we got to the Russian Orthodox church on the top of Neroberg (a very big hill, or a very small mountain, take your pick).

 We were disappointed to find out that you had to pay to go inside, and once inside you weren't allowed to take pictures.  We didn't go inside.  But we did walk around...

 and found an old outdoor amphitheater...

 and a monopteros

   and then came to the Nerobergbahn - funicular railway...

which is where Cora got stung twice on her arm by a wasp :(  Despite the pain, she was a trooper, and we continued our journey, descending down the hill, in this water-powered (running since 1888) rail/cable car, and enjoying a beautiful view of the city.

At the bottom of Neroberg is a small museum for the Nerobergbahn in this little building...

 which apparently used to be a an urban toilet house? ;)

From here we were able to hop back onto the train - well, it was a different one, but going on the same route.  The driver of our second train was smoking a pipe, which seemed like just the thing for a touristy train driver in Germany to do ;)

That was pretty much it.  We headed back to the where we had started, and after a quick trip to the gummy bear store we went home ;)

Messel Fossil Pit

Our Out and About crew went together for a tour of the Messel Fossil Pit, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site. 

What's unique about the fossils from the Messel pit are 1) the quality of the preservation - not just entire skeletons, but soft tissue (skin and muscles), fur, feathers, and intestinal contents, 2) the quantity, and 3) the diversity of species.  Each of these can be found separately at other fossil sites, but not all together.  The fossils date back to the Eocene period, 50 million years ago.

Here is the pit from up top.

We hiked all the way around the perimeter and down into the middle of it.  The pit used to be filled with a lake and looked like this.

It was drained so that it could be mined for oil shale in the mid 1800's.  The pits wealth of fossils was discovered around 1900, but it was still mined until the 1970's when oil prices fell.  Even then, it was slated to become a landfill - A LANDFILL! - but thankfully they didn't meet some requirements or something, and the Hessian state bought the land in 1991 to secure scientific access, and was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1995.

 Our tour guide, standing by a well that collects and purifies water from the pit, which then gets pumped to the village.

 This was one of the active collection sites we passed.

 And this is one of the fossils they found right when we were passing by.

 They have to keep the fossils wet until they can preserve them in resin, because the shale breaks down and deteriorates so quickly.

 Cora wasn't with us because she was at FSY at the time.

Above is Alex holding fossilized poop - love his face ;)  And here are a few more fossils that were in the museum.