This past weekend I went hiking in the Vosges Mountains with a friend from Krav Maga as well as with a bunch of other people he knows. The site was about an hour drive from Strasbourg. It was a lot of fun, and it was definitely nice to get out of the city for the day and breathe the air see some trees.

I left the house at 9:30 in the morning and didn’t come back till around 6! That’s a long time. The place we went hiking to was the site of an old chateau, called Fleckenstein. It sits right on the border of France and Germany in northern Alsace, near a town called Gimbelhof.

It was a lot of fun to hike- I wore a long sleeve shirt and a light wind jacket on top, and I was so lucky that my friend from Krav Maga had an extra jacket for me to put on top of that, because it was seriously cold. It actually got to be freezing cold at some points.

The views were beautiful. Check out the photos. The chateau itself was just a dilapidated stone structure, but I guess it’s cool to think about what it was back in the day. (Klaus Gessler- “Imagine what it was like for the pilgrims when they first were here and there was NOTHING...”) According to the website, some dude named Gottfried von Fleckenstein was living in the chateau in the early 12th century. The Fleckenstein family became the most powerful noble family in Alsace over time. It seems that the castle stopped being used in 1689. Oh the Middle Ages.

We also had a picnic at one point amidst the debris of some other chateau. It was so French- wine, cheese, salami (which I brought!) and lots of butter. Good times for all.