Selection of images - home and village

Some arty pics of our house in Cemboing (thanks james)- doing work in the barn and some others - this one of Est our friend painting a portrait of the village for us - Brill.
Great pic of the church from our garden - had a wonderful time drinking in the garden on balmy eve's spotting satellites moving across the sky.

new large review of region posted

see archive article 'what others say' for a nice fresh overview of the area from a blogger.

link to see each village in region

www.routedescommunes.com
very good link - you can go to your area /east region - pick yours and click each village in turn and see an image or two.

hoorah - chopped the weeds 3 times which was a waste of time, now they are all nicely covered by a concrete terrace and gravel. A sigh of relief for my summer labour of love.

Europa Park Worth A Visit @ just £20 per

We went to europa park this year - last week in fact and it was totally awesome. You stray just a short drive from the french border into germany and it really is very german. The park, which is also german has seperate areas for each country with its own related themed rides which were really very good. Having done the Florida parks i had very low expectations for something i had not heard of here, but that was my first mistake, if you can get over the fact that there is no mickey mouse or movie themes, you'll have an awesome time on some very exciting rides and adventures. We went because there had been an article in the telegraph following the England footy teams wives going there when based in baden baden which is close by which said the rides scared the b'jesus out of the journalist.
Everything, in my view, was really good (if you avoid the german facination with shop window dummies and puppetry). We spent all day trying to just get round the major rides which we just about managed, one, the silver star scared the hell out of me at 130km an hour i think thats ok. One ride is inside the words biggest football, looks really lame from outside 'euro sat' or something. so you sit in a really un interesting box car, i pointed out how it wasnt likely to be anything special as there were no head restraints and only a minor harness, but i was very wrong, an awesome 'over long' g force roller nightmare in the dark.

I talked my 10 year old onto going on the pharoe ride or something like that, i pointed at how short the height restrictions were and how it was for little kids - but this too was a really crazy ride. Unlike here in the UK and USA, they are a lots less anal about how tall you need to be for the ride and they all seemed very safe, just a heck of a lot more scary than you can expect.
f you go, visit cassdandras curse - its seems very un 'special' and this is part of the deal, everyone goes in thinking its a b rate ride and you come out with wet pants and utter relief.
Lots of rides for little kids too, nice parks, mono rail, mono train etc Good gladiator show in the spanish colloseum with stunt men and horses and lots of sword play (sit at an end for the best view}.
www.europapark.de