After a great night’s sleep, a run (just for me) and a lovely breakfast with my mom, Imke came up with a great idea for a little outing. We took the bus to just outside of Osnabrück (about a 30-minute ride) to an area outside the neighborhood of Haste, where right outside the city limits, there are lovely fields, meadows, and stretches of forest left and right of a country road called Oestringer Weg. The area is called the Nettetal (literally, the valley of the river Nette, but since “nett” also means nice in German, it always sounds like people refer to “the nice valley”). We walked along that road until we came to an adorable little convent with a teeny tiny church and a large garden with a pond full of water lilies (if you seek the contemplative life of a nun, it would be the perfect place of calm and reflection). Later, we also passed the Oestringer Steine, a minor megalith gravesite (much disturbed over the centuries by farmers who wanted those darn granite chunks off their land!).
Then we turned to catch a trailhead for an excellently marked forest trail along the river (really just a brook) under a canopy of tall, leafy trees, listening to bird song and picking tiny wild raspberries along the way. Eventually we reached an old mill in rather bad shape, and sat at a table of a closed café to rest for a bit. We’d already walked about 3 miles and my mom’s feet needed a break! But all in all she walked 5 miles, and I was–as always–impressed with the excellent shape she’s in.
We backtracked for a while, but then went home through another bit of forest, since I had found a bus stop that was a little bit closer, with the additional advantage that this bus took us all the back to our doorstep about about 12:30. It was a wonderful morning excursion, and a bit of coffee and cheesecake was an excellent lunch to wrap it up. My mom took a nap (well-deserved), and we rested briefly but then set out to run some errands (a few groceries, wood glue, and light bulbs were needed). Once we got home, Mark replaced some of my mom’s complicated halogen lightbulbs in ceiling spotlights that are hard to reach, and glued a chair back together that had come apart. I made myself useful by fixing us a salad to go with dinner.
After dinner, we worked on various “work things” for a bit, while my mom read in her enclosed porch–a lovely place on these bright summer evenings, where you can still read without turning on a lamp at 9 pm!
