We are roughly 7 kilometers from Herrenberg (5 minutes by car, 15 minutes by bike and 35 minutes walk). There are no shops, although there is a bakery, a butchery and a small cafe in the next village, which is 5 minutes walk from us.
Here are the pics.
Front door to our apartment block. The lady who lives on the ground floor changes the welcoming flower arrangement often.
This is a view of our apartment. The balcony is for our lounge, and the window upstairs is for our bedroom.
This is the view from our Kitchen. The clock chimes regular chimes every 15 minutes and at 6am and 7pm it sounds off, a serious cacophany of sound, but I think we are pretty used to it by now, we hardly even notice it.
Here is part of the view from our lounge. Those are all fruit trees down below, with the forest in the background.
Here is more of the view from the lounge, but looking up towards the forest.
Below the kitchen is the church courtyard. Every 1st of May there is a mini festival, with wurst, other typical German food, and of course beer.
Although our aparment is quite modern, we are pretty surrounded by a lot of the older buildings. This is just outside our front door.
A lot of the old way of life is still maintained here. Old farming equipment is still used, a lot of the people have really old looking wooden ladders for getting the fruit. There is no hired labour here, so everyone has to do the farming themselves. I was quite surprised to see 2 little old ladies driving in a tractor, the one driving the other sitting on the back hitching a ride (sorry, no photo for that though).
The area we live is split into 3 areas actually, fields, fruit trees and the forest.
The bright yellow stuff is for Rape Seed oil, I think its called the Rape plant?
Cherry blossoms
Apples
The forest paths in winter
Some local wildlife. We also have wild pigs, but I haven't seen any of them yet.
This area is also quite famous for its bees and beehives. There is a nature school here for training bee keepers, and there is a bee trail for those energetic folk, with descriptions of the bees and their processes.
What do bees need? Flowers!!
Being a farming community, a lot of the people here keep animals about. Most people are quite freindly and let Levi come in and look at the animals and touch them.
Its quite exciting, for us this is now our back garden, and even when it is cold outside, its always a pleasure to go for a walk and see what our village has to show us.
