Category Archives: Weather
Beating the Heat in Germany
It’s sunny and 85 degrees outside (30 degrees C), and even the ducks are listless and miserable. My Texan friends might laugh, but stop to think about this first: Germany has almost no air conditioning! Everywhere you go right now, …
To the Heart of Winter
In February, Joe and I spent a happy four days near Feldberg in the Black Forest (Schwarzwald). It didn’t snow while we were there, but it had just finished snowing, and the stuff was lying around everywhere. This utterly fascinated …
Happy New Year!
What a peaceful nighttime scene! Just a quiet street in Rodenbach, Germany. But that was before the madness. I’m from the western United States, a land of droughts, dead vegetation, and fast-moving wildfires. More than 21,000 wildfires burned across my …
Winter Begins
In one of my happiest childhood memories, it is nighttime in north Texas, and I am standing with my brother Anthony in the middle of the street in the thickest snowfall I have ever seen. Enormous, fluffy flakes, pink in …
The Big Sleep
When we place a city on the imaginary globe in our minds, we tend to think first in terms of weather. Kaiserslautern, Germany, has a wonderfully mild climate: the average daytime temperature in winter here hovers several degrees above freezing. …
Art from life
I took this photo from my hotel balcony last weekend on the evening of our arrival in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. We stayed at Hotel Schatten on the Partenkirchen side, and I heartily recommend it. The church you see is Pfarrkirche Maria Himmelfahrt, …
The Bostalsee
Yesterday, Joe took a half-day holiday. The weather was perfect: 76 degrees F (24 C) and not a cloud in the sky. We wanted to spend it outdoors because the big H on the weather map is drifting south, and …
Leaf Fall
The leaves have started to change in Germany. That’s a very big deal to this Texas girl because where I come from the leaves don’t bother to fall off the trees until spring. We rake live oak leaves from February …
It’s been rainy and chilly. Last night was a crisp 43 degrees F (6 degrees C). Today is beautiful, though, sunny and hot–unseasonably warm for September. But it isn’t the start of Indian summer, as my friend Heidi points out. …
Carried Off by a Chill
This weekend, I woke up with a cold. My body ached, my nose was stuffy, and I felt weak and miserable. Now, the American thing to do is to think about where I picked up the germ, so I thought …