Every time Joe leaves town, I seem to become remarkably busy.  Three weekends ago when Joe was in Geneva, I hardly had a moment to myself!  Not that I’m complaining.  I already talking about the Sunday visit to the Science Express train, but Saturday was busy too.  On Saturday morning, I finally met the other American resident of Menden, Kairy, and her little son.  What, you say, there is another American living in Menden?  I know, I was shocked too.  She’s married to a German man who works at the air force base right next to DLR.  Hopefully when we’re all back from our visits to the US, we can see her again.

At noon on Saturday, Markus and his girlfriend Karen picked me up for an afternoon at the Kletterward in Brühl.  This is a high-ropes course, which, if you aren’t familiar with the concept, is a climbing site set into the top of trees.  You climb up a wooden ladder, then make your way from the platform around one tree to the next via “elements” like a tightrope or a cargo net or some kind of swing.  You’re between about 10 and 35 feet off the ground, and wearing a harness that clips to safety lines on each platform and element.  The most fun party is probably the slides at the end, where you hook your harness to a cable and zip-line back to the ground.

I’d heard about these for years, but only been on one once before, at the camp in Michigan where some friends got married two summers ago.  One of my camps, Camp Vermilion, used to have a high ropes course too, but the insurance was too expensive so they just have the team-building low ropes elements now.  This place in Brühl does nothing else, so they have a much bigger set-up.  There are six different courses of varying difficulty for adults, one of which is nothing but zip-lines.  Markus and Karen had never done it before, but they had a good time too.   There are more pictures of the course on the website under Galerie.

After we were too tired and sore to climb anymore, we went back to Markus’s place for dinner (Swedish meatballs a la Ikea… yummy) before taking in a showing of the new Star Trek movie at the English theater in Cologne.   It was good and I enjoyed it a lot, although it was kind of violent.  I don’t think Kirk and Spock ever got into fist fights on the bridge in the original version.  And Leonard Nemoy was, of course, fantastic.

Now, I know this is not quite as exciting as pictures from Geneva, which Joe promises he’s working on (our internet at home is almost always really slow these days… grrr) or pictures from our most recent trip to northern Germany, but hopefully they will tide you over until we can get the travel pictures up.