And after NESAT... holidays! Well, a few days of work inbetween, which included sourcing, portioning, packing, and sending off fabrics for a school project:



That was a fun thing to do - and I'm looking forward to hearing how it all played out!

After that, though, finally: Holidays. With the pandemic still a factor, we had been thinking about what to do for the holidays, and in the end, we had decided to do a bicycle tour again. Our last one was several years ago (paddling and hiking came inbetween), and The Most Patient Husband of Them All had wanted to do the Bodensee-Königssee-Route for a long time now, so in the end, that was what we chose to do. It was clear before that we had more days than the tour would be good for, so the plan was to ride the train down to Lindau with the tandem, then do the tour, and afterwards cycle homewards as far as we'd get.

Well. That plan did not survive its encounter with reality or, to be more precise, the strike of the train personnel... so we ended up going by train for a short bit, then cycling a bit, then catching a train that was actually going a few days later and riding down to Lindau. Never mind, though - our plan was to have fun on the bike, and that we did.

[caption id="attachment_6442" align="alignnone" width="300"] The bike, loaded up with all our gear.


The tour was wonderful, and quite hilly. We spent the nights in our tent and found out that campsites in that alpine area are ridiculously expensive compared to other places - but, well, they're still cheaper than staying in proper buildings, and the tent is a very good choice in pandemic times.

I usually take along something to read (ebooks for the win on trips like that), and something fun to do, and in this case, my pharaoh accompanied me. I did actually get around to do a little bit of weaving - not much, since the evenings were rather short daylight-wise - but enough to make me happy to have taken it along.

[caption id="attachment_6441" align="alignnone" width="300"] Proof of the travelling pharaoh!


I even managed to re-heddle and fix a heddling mistake! That was very satisfactory.

Altogether, we cycled close to 1000 km, with two rest days (one spent on the train to Lindau, and one spent at the Königssee). We also felt very old-fashioned and a bit odd with all the e-bikes zooming past us, especially on the two first days of the tour proper, where it was quite hilly and quite steep...

 

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you will know that I a) do own a car (or, to be really correct, I own my own company, and said company owns a car, and that b) I am very fond of cycling, and will try to use the bike or public transport instead of driving whenever possible.

Car vs. Bike is, to my constant consternation, a very emotionally heated debate here in Germany. I really don't understand this - and I guess quite a lot of it is due to some anti-green propaganda. But let me explain this a bit better.

It's quite typical that, if somebody says "people could take the bike to do that" or "bikes are more sustainable than cars", someone else cries out "but you cannot forbid people to use the car, not everyone can be car-free" or "but bikes are not suitable to transport heavy goods or multiple people". Basically, what happens is the implication that everyone who is pro-bicycle, or mentions benefits from bikes wants everyone to instantly ditch their car and go by bike everywhere and for everything, no matter what.

This is definitely not true, but it happens all the time, and it's not making the situation better.

I grew up in a small town at the end of nowhere, and everybody there used the car for about everything. Children rode bikes, but as soon as you turned 17, you'd register for driving school, and you'd typically get your license on your 18th birthday (the earliest point possible back then), and then you had mobility, and freedom, and many of my peers also had their first own car then, or got use of the family car. My home town is not very bike-friendly regarding the streets, and it's a bit hilly, but both things are also not very bad, so it would be perfectly possible to cycle more than is usual there. On the other hand, there used to be next to no public transport (which has not changed much) - so for any visits to neighbouring villages or towns, you'd need a car.

Today, I live in a bike-friendly city, and we're doing all of our everyday stuff by bike. There's also decent public transport, which allows to take bikes along in the metro trains so you can use your own transport for the last mile. However, there's still the car - and I need that for going to fairs and markets, because there's just no way that I could transport all the things necessary to set up a booth in public transport. Exceptions apply, such as when I went to Dublin for WorldCon - though I had most of the booth logistics supplied by the con there. If you have to bring your own tables and seats like for most fairs, that's just straight out not possible.

So. I am fully aware of the benefits of a car - but I'm also aware of their drawbacks. Personally, I think that bikes are the best thing for mobility in many cases, and many circumstances. They are resource-friendly (and even an e-bike uses much less material and energy than a car), they keep you healthy, they are quiet and don't take up much space, it's easy to find a parking space for them just where you want to go, and for short to medium distances in daily life, especially in towns, they are faster than a car. Even for the 10-something kilometers to our regular bouldering place, it takes us just as long to go by car as it does by bike! Yes, they have limited transport capacity (though it's amazing what you can pack on if you have a bit of practise), and they do not protect you from the weather (unless you have a velomobile), but these are things where there's still the option to take a car. (Or lend a cargo bike.)

Nobody of the sane people promoting the bike as a very good option for personal transport wants everyone to stop using cars right now. All that we want is for more people to consider cycling (or walking) instead of hopping into the car more often, because every little bit helps. So it makes me very sad when the response to "more cycling" is an automatic "bikes cannot solve everything!!!!11!!". No, they cannot, but neither can cars.

And then there's e-bike bashing, too. Yes, they take more resources to make than a non-electrified bike. There's also the people looking down their noses at e-bikers, because apparently, in their minds, if you need the motor, you are a lesser person. WTF? If an e-bike means there will be more cycling instead of car driving, I'm all, all for it. I don't care for the reason that someone adds a motor to a bike, whether it's laziness or unfitness or some other physical condition or the fact that it's just more fun to go supported or the need to get somewhere reliably quickly without breaking a sweat or the desire to ride on the latest fad wave or the fact that the friends in the cycling group all have an e-bike and there's no way to keep up without one - any reason is valid. And any kilometer done by bike, whether e or not, whether it's to replace a car trip or it's a fun ride just for cycling's sake, is a good thing.

I'm done with my rant for now... but I'm curious: Have you encountered that "you want to forbid everything! go away"-phenomenon, too? Regarding cycles, or something that a green party said or promoted, where you are? And what's your opinion on the bike-vs-car thing? Let me know in the comments...

One of the things that become hard to buy if you want to buy them plastic-free? Ice cream. Which is a pity, since I love ice cream. (Though this year, the everlasting, returning-daily rain has somehow curbed that craving a bit.)

We bought an ice maker gadget a few years ago, to be able to make our own ice cream, so the solution to plastic-free ice cream was already at hand. The problem? Finding really good recipes.

Especially for that staple of ice creams: Vanilla. Most recipes you find are really, really heavy on cream and egg yolks, and I plain refuse to use 6 egg yolks for a 6-person serving of vanilla ice cream. (Egg yolks, fat, and sugar are all ingredients that make the ice cream creamy, so much of them will make much creaminess.)

I thus went and tried something with just a bit of this, and that, and it actually turned out fantastic - it's not freezing up rock-solid, it's sweet but not too sweet, and it tastes a lot of vanilla. So here you go:

13 g vanilla sugar (homemade, it's a mix of 9 parts sugar and 1 part vanilla)
400 ml milk (full-fat)

Stir vanilla sugar into the milk and bring to a boil; simmer gently for a few minutes to bring out the vanilla taste. Take off the heat, mix in

70 g sugar
12 g cornstarch (stirred into a little bit of water)

and bring to a boil again. Mix in

100 g cream (cold)

- this should cool your mix down to about 70° C; if not, make it so. Then stir in

1 egg yolk

and stir gently until slightly thickened.

Let it all cool off, place into the fridge until it's really cold through, then use your ice maker to make ice cream from this.

And if you do... let me know how you like it!

 

Time for a link post again!

Viking age embroidery, of the spectacular type.

Archaeology in GB is threatened through a new regulation.

Energy efficiency in old buildings can be a problem - for example the old windows don't hold in the heat, or up to modern standards. There's been a project in Germany to test solutions for this, with good success. That is very nice! (Here's an article in German about it.)

Bronze Age fabrics in Denmark were, to a rather large percentage, made from imported wool. How can one tell? By strontium isotope analysis. The future helping to understand the past! You can read more about this here.

In Germany, the pandemic has led to a lot more bikes being sold than before - especially e-bikes. Here's a little article about the beginnings of the bike (in German or English).

To my very great delight and rather considerable relief, my right upper arm is currently looking like this:



A very friendly doctor stabbed a needle into the muscle this morning and then pressed some of the good juice in. She also did it so gently and carefully that I felt about... nothing. I've actually felt more when grasses rubbed my skin with their prickly ends - not to speak at all about a midge bite, or scratchy madder plants, which both have been able to draw blood.

So... I will gladly forego bouldering for the next two days due to this (no sports for two days, she said). The second shot will be in six weeks' time, which means it's just in time for the full protection to be in place for the Textile Forum.

Whew.

What do bees do at night? Well, they sleep. Sometimes, if you have a lot of (native) flowers in your garden, and there's consequently a lot of bees... you can find them sleeping there. Like this tiny bee, who curled up for a cosy night on the bottom of a bellflower:



Or this bumblebee, who hung underneath a scabiosa flower:



When they sleep, they are certainly much easier to photograph than when they are flitting around!

It's getting summery warm here, and things in the garden are sprouting - including, to my great delight, the old variety of beans that I've been sent last year. Yay!

A lot of other things are already in full bloom. Including the potato plants:



Most modern potato varieties have been bred to not bloom anymore, so they spend all their energy on making potatoes. It's a little sad though, with the really nice look that these flowers have.

The lupine is also blooming:



And there's lots and lots of wild bees, honey bees and bumble bees around, getting their nectar and pollen from the flowers in the garden.



That's a quite small wild bee. Unfortunately it's quite hard to classify these critters, not only because they are hard to catch well enough on a photograph, but also because there's quite a lot of species and sub-species that look very similar to each other.

Meanwhile, the cat is utterly unimpressed by all this and spends half her time sleeping in the wintergarden on a chair, and the other half sleeping indoors on the sofa: