To the market

Monday, November 03, 2008 – Today we went on a group hike from the hotel. We car pooled with a couple with a car. She was from L.A. and now lives in Stuttgart with her husband. They were nice and we seemed to be of similar mindset. The hike was along a gorge and started 6km from the hotel. It was very nice with little waterfalls as the water worked its way down the gorge. It was a nice 2 hour hike.

After the hike we got dropped off in town and walked to the grocery store. We put one Euro into a slot on the grocery cart handle to check out the cart, and we get the Euro back when we insert the key from the kart in front of it; not a bad system. The store is much smaller than home, which isn’t a bad thing. We bought lots of nice rolls / bread, then we picked out some meats, cheeses, and a few other items for dinner…what has become our typical meal. I especially figured I would have some raw milk cheese since we are not allowed to have that in the states. We packed the food in a clothe sack and my backpack and headed back down the foot path to the hotel. On the way we stopped at the travel agency to see how much a train to Zurich or Venice would be.

Once we got back we had a great meal with our new groceries. We relaxed a bit and then went back into town. We decided to do the Venice trip, so we went back and booked our trip…we saved $40E on the train reservation from a few hours earlier; however, we decided to get a better hotel in the city closer to the train station – so it ended up being the same.
We then did a bit of shopping and eventually returned to the hotel. We made a vegetable ravioli with a good tomato sauce. We decided to bypass the schnapps tasting and call it an early evening. We didn’t do much today, but managed to get some exercise and stock up on some food.