Last Sunday was not, as you may remember, a good day for fluffies. The entire train ride was consumed with detangling yarn. The week has since been better.
On Monday, TheEnabler, his college buddy and I took the local train down from Cologne to Bingen, and from there took a ferry across the Rhine to Rudesheim am Rhein. The train ride provided some decent knitting time on TheEnabler’s cowl. I left the crochet behind, still feeling somewhat wary of it after Sunday and because I could knit the simple p2 k2 while admiring the view out the window.
From Rudesheim we took the cable car to the top of the hills and walked from there to the cable car down into Assmannshausen. It was a gorgeous walk through the trees with occasional glimpses out over the Rhine River.
Why yes, that’s a spindle in my hand. It was mostly a nice wide fairly level walking path, making spinning while walking fairly easy. We had really lovely weather and returned to Cologne via a boat ride up the Rhine as far as Koblenz, and then a train the remainder of the way to Cologne.
On Tuesday we took a tour of the Cathedral, which took over 600 years to complete:
The images on the walls are only in as good a shape as they are due to the fact that for most of the Cathedral’s history there were tapestries covering the walls. Now, they sometimes have large flakes of paint peel off during the hot summer months.
We also visited the Romisch-Germanisches museum next door. On the bottom floor were some cool textile related objects:
On the left are loom weights. In the middle is a collection of spindles, needles and thimbles and on the right are leather sandles and sandle soles. I think these are all items unearthed under the city, but they are a bit fuzzy on dates on the tags.
Lastly, I hit up one yarn store with my brother in law’s significant other. 
We went to Lauras Wollanden and both picked up Lana Grossa yarns. On the right is my purchase – 100g of mohair/alpaca/wool/poly goodness for TheEnabler (he has a small mohair addiction). On the left is my effort at being an enabler – encouraging my shopping partner in crime to get the baby alapca bulky yarn she was admiring. I find I like working with thinner yarns more, so I was happy for the chance to help pick out bulky yarns with somebody since I rarely spend much time in that section of the yarn store.
On the train back, my crochet yarn behaved better and now I’m safely past the problem skein and onto the third color:
Finally, some bonus pics:
My sister is visiting us after spending a couple weeks in Scotland where she bought me a book on weaving.
My dad has been on a river cruise in Russia and sent me the picture above of Russian Distaves which are L shaped so the spinning sits on the end to stabalize it. The pic is from the village of Mandrogi, which showcases 19th-early 20th century Russian village life. They also apparently boast the worlds largest felt boot (seriously, twice as tall as a tall person).