I didn’t think that we could top the fun of Europa Park in the few remaining days so we decided to take things easy.

I talked before of Robyn’s love of animals and since there is nature park called Lange Erlen in Basel I thought it would be nice to take a picnic and spend an afternoon there.

Everything went well as we wandered around looking at the animals.

About half way around we came to the pond complete with more ducks, some black swans, storks nesting in the trees and a huge peacock.

Julie made a comment something to the effect “look at the size of that peacock. I’m glad he’s behind that fence” and with that we sat down at one of the picnic tables, unpacked our sandwiches and began to eat.

Within moments of starting to tuck into our sandwiches I caught the figure of the peacock jumping over the fence and heading straight for us!

Although Robyn loves animals she’s not so keen on birds and so she freaked out and jumped up and ran off, followed closely by Julie and Jenna (who threw her sandwich at the peacock in an attempt to disctract it)! I stood there frozen not knowing what to do until a kind passerby shooed it away!

We must have seemed like a table of crazy people, LOL!!! The peacock actually was pretty timid and just spent the rest of our picnic honking at us waiting for it’s own lunch to be served. Robyn said that peacocks could join pigeons on the list of birds she was scared of, oh dear….

The trauma of the peacock over we strolled around the rest of the park looking at the rest of the wildlife with many of them enjoying their lunch too!

On Saturday we went for a drive to Freiburg Im Breisgau. Freiburg is the capital of the Black Forest and contains the most Old Town, unfortunately the heat was starting to take it’s toll on the girls so we didn’t stay for very long but we did get a chance to visit the Münster (Cathedral).

I would really recommend that anyone who is visiting this part of the Black Forest definately include Freiburg Im Breisgau on their must list. It is a truly beautiful city.

Since Stewart and I won’t see Robyn on her birthday we decided to get her present whilst she was here and to surprise her with birthday cake so we could have a little celebration before she went home.

With that in mind when we returned home from Freiburg I went to the SBB (train station) with Julie so we could visit Sprüngli and buy a cake.

Sprüngli has the most wonderful range of hand-made chocolates, cakes and treats, not forgetting their cakes! I picked out an ice cream gateaux which was made out of vanilla ice cream containing crushed meringues with a central layer of strawberry sorbet!! It really looked the part and the girl in the shop kindly boxed it with dry ice so that the cake didn’t melt during the car ride home.

On Sunday we returned to the Gartenbad for the day and surprised Robyn with her birthday cake on our return. Her face lit up like a picture when she realized it was for her!!

What a wonderful week, I had a ball!!!