Catching up

The days sure go by fast.  Here I am with 3 days of activities to report.  And I need to insert a few pictures.  So here goes.

Friday:  This was my pilgrimage day.  We traveled to Basel, Switzerland, a very old city on the Rhine River where Switzerland, Germany and France meet.  But my primary reason for going was this:

This plaque is on the side of the parish house in which Leonhard Euler lived during his childhood.  Here is the house and church:

Basel was also the home of the Bernoulli family, so I found this to commemorate them:

Saturday we drove to Stuttgart, about 2 hours north of here.  Well, 2 hours if you drive in the right lane on the autobahn.  In the left lane, you can make it in about 1.5 hours.  Which is what we did on the way home.  150 km/hr is about the average speed in that lane.  (I will leave it to you to calculate what that speed is in mph.)  And my informal survey showed that the fastest drivers were driving Audis.  I am sure that several were going nearly 200 km/h.

We had a built-in tour guides in our friends who live and pastor in Stuttgart, Alfred and Mary (Schramm) Schaar.  I want to show you a couple of pictures of interesting sites in the neighborhood where they live.  A couple of blocks one direction was the workshop where Gottleib Daimler built his first 4-stroke engine in 1875.  Here is a picture through the window of the workshop showing a motorcycle he built using the engine:

And a block the other direction, there is this empty lot on the street:

Until 1938, a Jewish synagogue was located here.  This was the synagogue Albert Einstein attended as a child.  It was burned on Kristallnacht.

Today, Sunday we visited the International Nazarene Church in Busingen and then drove around Schaffhausen.  We got into a hilltop fortress

and went to the Rheinfalls

So there you are.  Up to date on our travels.  If you want to read about the more personal things that have happened, you will probably have to wait until Marilyn gets her post together.