Puerto Pollenca

I came back to Mallorca yesterday, Sheila will follow on Saturday. The weather is sunny with top temperatures of 22 degrees, very pleasant and great to be back.

Still in Heidelberg

We are enjoying our time in Heidelberg, catching up with friends from our time here in the 90s and meeting new people. Setting up our place keeps us busy, and I still go into the Kopfklinik every day for radiation therapy (well tolerated up to now). Yesterday, I went to an exhibition on warfare in the local area over the last 10,000 years. Very interesting! The exhibition was planned to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the destruction of Heidelberg in the Thirty Year War, but the Ukraine war has made it that much more timely. The curator gave a fascinating talk as we walked through the small number of very amazing exhibits. The weather is very much fall weather with fog in the mornings, the occasional shower, but also a lot of sunshine.

View of Heidelberg Castle on a nice fall day

Krieg und Frieden, Kurpfälzisches Museum, Heidelberg

Echo from Canada

Came across a nice echo from Canada today: Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland, discussing what has changed in the World since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and how Western democracies should respond. Take some time, the video is an hour long.

https://www.brookings.edu/events/how-democracies-can-shape-a-changed-global-economy/

Fall weather

We are enjoying nice fall weather and took a break from setting up our apartment to walk in the fields and woods above Handschuhsheim. It was quite foggy in the morning, but later the sun came out.

Setting up a home

We are still busy setting up our new place, making good progress while I take my once daily trip to the Kopfklinik. The guest room is ready. Andrea is close by, staying with a friend and working from Heidelberg for a couple of weeks. She helped us last night, with a good friend of ours, setting up the bedroom wardrobe.

Back in Heidelberg

We are back in Heidelberg and very busy. We are trying to furnish our new flat, and delivery times for furniture are rather long. Plus we need all kinds of other things that require multiple trips to the hardware store. We are also dealing with the bureaucracy of moving from Canada to Germany, which turns out more complex and bothersome than we anticipated. Our boat in Vancouver is for sale, and shortly after it went live on the Internet, we received the first offer, resulting in us having a late night to overlap with Vancouver time. I am also still involved in some biotech stuff, and have to go to the Heidelberg university clinic for daily radiation therapy. The weather was great today, warm sunshine and I am taking some time off to join Fat Bear Week in Katmai National Park Alaska (virtually), watching bears fishing and voting for the fattest.

Katmai National Park, Alaska
live https://explore.org/livecams/brown-bears/brooks-live-chat
meet the bears https://explore.org/meet-the-bears

The BBC also picked up the Fat Bear Week story (a day later).

 

The view from my office in our new apartment

Zurich

We came to Zurich yesterday to celebrate a wedding anniversary of good friends. We stayed in a 600 year old inn, but had an excellent modern dinner and a quiet night. The party was on the car deck of a ferry on Lake Zurich, with great food and music, lots of dancing and meeting old and new friends. The weather was cold, windy and wet in the morning, in the afternoon the sun came out. We had a great day!

A quiet night in a 600 year old building

Dancing in the rain on a ferry, a first for us!

The sun came out in the evening

Heidelberg

We are spending time in Heidelberg, staying at houses of various friends. We found a two bedroom apartment to rent from next week on, close to where we lived in the early 90s with the kids. This week Sheila is in Manchester, I am dealing with medical stuff. The weather is beautiful and sunny during the day but quite chilly at night.

Wiesbaden

We have arrived in Germany and are spending the night in Wiesbaden. In front of our hotel balcony is a plane tree with over 100 parakeets roosting and a plaza with some jazz musicians playing very nicely. Sheila is convinced that the parakeets try to join the music, unfortunately I can’t post a video. The sound is absolutely amazing.

Back in Vancouver

Andrea went to Whistler and we came back into Vancouver today. Ancient Murrelet is for sale now as we are preparing to move to Germany. The eight years of boating in the Pacific Northwest were great.