Fossils and storks

Another fine day. We drove first to a park where, among other things, dinosaur tracks and fossils have been preserved in a chalk stone cliff (not a museum at all). It was about a half hour walk from the parking lot, along a wide gravel path lined with trees and bushes. Leandro once again decided to have a pee, this time along the side of the path. When I asked Esther about this, she said it was pretty normal in Switzerland to see people peeing in the wilderness. Live and learn.

It was a lovely walk, somewhat marred by Leandro’s penchant for picking up huge tree branches and swinging them wildly around; however, nobody was hurt. The cliff face itself was very interesting. There were a number of educational plaques to inform visitors of what the tracks were, what kind of dinosaurs made them (primarily brachiosauruses) and detailing the types of fossils and the age of the imprints. Although the stone is chalk, it’s quite hard, and will probably last another 145 million years.

We then made our way back down the path, alternately carrying Torsten and letting him run, past an ancient chairlift that took people up the mountain, and back to the car. From there, we drove to a nice inn, where people could have lunch in a clearing overlooking a lake and ferry dock (it reminded me of a biergarten). The inn was called the Inn of the Green Monkey. There, we all had schnitzel for lunch. It was particularly interesting because it was near the stork preserve, and so the inn itself had 4 storks’ nests on the roof, complete with storks and baby storks! Very cool.

After lunch, we went to the stork preserve, which was just down the road. It turns out that it’s no longer a stork preserve because the project to breed them, build up the population to self-sustaining levels, and release them into the wild, had succeeded. There are still a large number of storks and storks’ nests around the area, but they are no longer actively being preserved by people, as it is no longer necessary. We were lucky to come in the spring, as we saw many storks and their babies. The storks make an interesting clacking sound with their beaks; I’m not sure what it means, but it sounded neat. Torsten had a good time pointing out all the “birts”, and hopping up onto the stone borders and walking around. There’s still an information centre there, so we read about how the storks migrate to Africa every year, and all about the breeding and gestation habits of the storks. There was also a small enclosure with a European turtle in it.

We then decided to head back to the house. Torsten fell asleep in the car, and is currently napping. I’m not sure what we’re going to do tonight – possibly play Ticket to Ride, since we bought it and the Swiss expansion for Uwe and Esther as a guest-gift, but one thing’s for sure – we’re going to have to pack. Tomorrow we head off to Frankfurt airport to spend the night in the hotel there, and then on Tuesday, we fly home. We’re also going to be meeting Marco, Ingrid and Glenn tomorrow – they’re coming to our hotel to see us and to talk about Glenn’s upcoming exchange program to Canada, when he’ll be staying with us. It’ll be great to see them again, and it’s even nicer to be heading home soon!