Liam's best day ever

Soon after meeting Liam, most people will quickly realize that trains are one of his favorite things in the world. He likes to watch them, ride them, read about them and do pretty much anything connected with them.

So it was a wonderful idea from the Jones family to take us to a miniature train park in Switzerland last time we were visiting. The name fairly much says it all, it was a small park where you rode a circuit on mini-trains, past models of things like castles, mountain hotels, bridges, the works.

here is the little round house with some locomotives waiting to be brought out.
Liam of course got excited very fast and wanted to get right on the trains, so we crossed over the little platform and took our first ride.

Some of the sights we went by were the tiny church and the tiny mountain hotel.

As usual, when there was someone else around providing entertainment, Claudia and I were completely forgotten. Liam loves his Aunt Doris and when she is around, we are lucky if Liam even notices we are still there. He fairly much clings to Doris as soon as he sees her.



Here is another good example, Ryan and I took a break from endless train rides and Claudia and Doris took Liam on another round. Notice how Liam chooses to sit on the train...
One other amusing thing we saw at this place was a pair of Goths. That is right! black haired, black lipsticked, black dressed skull tattooed, depressing music loving Goths. Now I know I can add miniature trains to the list of things that Goths love, it is probably somewhere on their list of loves between Vampires and Bergman films.
Oh, this was also the place where we enjoyed our Swiss hot dogs, as featured in an earlier post.

Rose Garden in Geneva

Wow, I still have so many photos from Geneva in August I have not posted.

Here are some from a visit to a nice rose garden right in the centre of town. It includes another rare picture of me. Since I am so often taking them, I do not appear in too many. It looks ok, but I think Claudia is quite a bit more photogenic than I am...

Liam has an obsession with washing his hands, and there were a few fountains in this park for him to enjoy. As you can see, Ryan got the privilege of being taken to every "handewasser" spot.

Work Event - Hochseilepark

A couple of weeks ago we had a "team building" event that was to be a big surprise. My boss just told us all to be prepared for some fun outdoor activity that was quite sporty. Not knowing what to expect, we all prepared ourselves and hoped for good weather. As it turned out, we went down to Lake Constance to a "Hochseilepark" where a sort of obstacle course is set up in the tree tops.

You need to navigate your way through various ropes, bridges, obstacles to get to the end, all between 20-50 feet off the ground.
There was two groups there, mine, representing Inkjet supplies, and our neighbours, who are consumer business development. Surely those names bring out images of a real sports crowd. First we had to get all equipmented up in our safety gear. Here is the group, I am on the far right.
First we had our safety instruction and directions. This was all in German, which did not build confidence in the non-germans there. We had Canadians, Hungarians, Italians, Belgians, Americans, Austrians, and Swedish folks in the group. We are quite an international group. Next we were off to climb up into the trees and get started. As an added bonus, I was nominated to go first. Do I look like the sort wanting to blaze the trail? no. But I went anyway, it at least let me get photos of the rest of the group from the front. A couple of these photos were taken by my colleague's camera, especially those with me in them. In the first image, you can see me leading the way as my colleagues look on in awe at my majesty.

The first few obstacles were not too tough and not that high yet. but you did need to watch your balance and not be afraid of falling off. Despite a pretty strong fear of heights, I had no problems. The harness and rope pretty much put me at ease and I did not feel scared at all. In fact, only one person from the whole group backed out as being afraid, you can look back at the group photo and try to guess who it was. The first photo here is my boss Jaimi, giving directions, the second is one of the members of my mini-group, Sarah. We split into threes to navigate the course, as each tree platform could hold three maximum.

One of the more interesting obstacles was the "tarzan swing" where you swung on a rope from one platform to another. Harder than it looks. Here is Robert preparing to go and Sybille in Action.

We did get pretty high off the ground at some points. Here is Magdalena walking across a bridge of sticks and a high platform with Andras and Sybille on top:

Another scary one looked simple, it was two barrel like structures that you had to crawl through, but going between them was not so easy, they wobbled a lot and it was pretty scary to look straight down between them with nothing there until the ground. It was quite a bit harder for very short people. Here is Sarah going through them.

All in all a very fun event, kudos to my boss for the selection, I plan to go back there on my own time to try this again as a fun thing to do, I think Claudia would have fun here as well. It is only about two hours from my house and it is surprisingly inexpensive. It only costs 9 Euro for three hours including all equipment, not bad at all and after three hours you are pretty pooped.

I'm Back

Sorry, for such a long delay in making posts, it was just too much hub-bub the past weeks with my mother visiting and everything. I was busy taking lots of photos and doing nice visit related activities.

The visit was very nice, longer than any prior visit and I think it is the first time we had bad weather when my mother was here. Has to be expected in September though, we have had temperature ranges from 7 to 26 degrees in the last two weeks. Crazy. Liam had the best time as usual, since he had someone to entertain him pretty much uninterrupted for three full weeks. This of course makes him a happy boy who is easier to deal with, I hope that he is OK now that things are returning to normal.

She did bring lots of old photos, so I will start up my first post with a nice old one of me in my favorite slick looking baby-outfit. pretty darn cool isn't it. I think I am around 3 here.
As the years went by, my parents continued to dress me in bright Christmas outfits. This one must be from when I was 8 or 9, and wearing a nice Anderson Tartan blazer. Sweeeeeet.

At The Zoo

Sorry for the short posts, since my Mum is here visiting right now, I am not really taking the time to fill in things quite so elaborately. However, I am stockpiling lots of photos for future posts.

So, to summarize today, we were at the zoo and saw this monkey.

Toast Hawaii

I made Hawaiian toast for lunch for all of us. Here is a short film to enjoy.


Ta daaaa

Visit to Ulm

Yesterday my mother and I went to Ulm, where we saw the famous Gothic Cathedral. Here is that lovely building. They are the tiny specks...

It has the tallest church steeple in the world. 160.5 metres and 768 steps to walk up. We decided to go up, despite my significant fear of heights. For a sense of scale, here is a photo of some workers hanging on ropes doing some repair work. I think this is about the worst job int he world.
It is a shame that the weather was so overcast, it would have been nice to take some photos with a nice blue sky in the background...

Anyway we walked up many many stairs.

This was rather tiring. However once we got to the top, the view was indeed impressive.

The Big Carousel

Something else we came across in the botanical garden was a big strange carousel. It was made to look like one of those "olde tyme" kind of ones with lots of clockwork animals and sort of vintage feel to it. Personally it reminded me of a sort of "Steampunk" kind of feel.

Here are some of the crazy animals for the wee folk to ride on:


of course a certain little someone had to get a ride on it and Aunt Doris was happy to indulge him.


They chose to ride in the giant mechanical Turtle.

Greenhouse

On one part of our trip, we paid a visit to the Geneva botanical gardens. it is a big nice park in the middle of the city and we thought Liam would like to run around and look at things. One of the first places we went was a nice big greenhouse.

This particular greenhouse was home to some nice desert flora. On one side was nice african plants and on the other north american desert plants. Here are the north american cacti. I did find this warning sign amusing, apparently these were not cacti as I know them, but were "Thorny Succulents" Perhaps this is the correct term for them, but I still found it funny.

So we held back and did not touch them. I liked that you could climb up the stairs very high an look down on the people below. Always nice to do.