May Day not mayday

May Day is a traditional hiking day of the (bigger) family. The destination was a place within the Swabian Alb and that usually means lots of limestone (usually with some cliffs), caves and quite often an old castle or the remains thereof. The elevation is called "Rosenstein" which literally means "rose stone". 

The weather was nice so the place was really crowded which was the only downside of the trip.  

 Lathyrus vernus (Fühlings-Platterbse)- had to look that up ;) Lots of woodruff was growing there, too.

One of the best geocaches I have seen. Walked by a few times without looking at it close enough to see that this is not a home for birds.  

 The remnants of the castle and also the location of another geocache. The rest of the family was watching while I was climbing the walls :) They didn't quite catch the exitement ...

Mission travel bug completed!

This time I was successful reaching the destination AND finding the cache. It was a hiking trip in the snow - according to the GPS ~5.2 km in a nice round trip. Since a few people have used the path, hiking was fairly easy except for a few rare areas where I sank in. And the big advantage: no people on the trails at all - they are all skiing on the illuminated track. Since it was getting dark I even saw two moose which is the very first time I've ever seen them close to Oslo. Due to the lack of light and them moving away from me very fast and a missing zoom lens I couldn't take a picture to proove I've seen them :(
Yet I can show some other moose pictures from Alaska:

Running ...

... looking...

... picking up junior...

... and into the woods.

All taken from the car in the middle of the day (on a road with no cars though). We didn't understand why she was running parallel to the road but after the small one turned up to our surprise it was clear where she was running to.

Geocaching

Actually I have been infected by him a while ago. Several times, we went out geocaching together and it was great fun to look for the hidden boxes :). Yet, I hadn't quite made up my mind if I wanted to buy a GPS or not. Things changed when my quite old mobile phone gave up to work and I needed a new one so I decided to get one with GPS receiver. The GPS itself was actually quite accurate once it worked but it always needed some time until it started to work and the biggest disadvantage was the battery - it was only good for about half a day and of course a phone doesn't use normal batteries, you could easily take with you. So, finally I got a real GPS and am really happy with it.
Between Christmas and New Year, I picked up a travel bug which had Norway as one of it's preferred destinations so I took it with me and am now trying to set it out.
The first time I went skiing on the illuminated track since it was already dark and unfortunately couldn't find the cache although I must have been close to it.
The second time I tried to ski in the backcountry on a hiking trail and didn't come very far - snowshoes would have been better because the top of the snow cover was frozen and the ground rather uneven - oh well at least I didn't meet any people and that was the main goal :)



Looks like fluffy nice snow but it is more like cement ;)






That's the so called Swedish wall - normally out of rocks.



The sky looked very nice unfortunately I didn't really get a good spot completely without trees.



And a blurred moon ... looked much better of course