Friday, July 30th, we spent a lovely day with my friend Pamela. Pamela used to live just down the hill from us, and one day she called me up out of the blue to see if we wanted to take turns driving our kids to preschool in town. She saw my name on the class list, figured I must be American with a name like Amy Charles, and took a chance. We have been good friends ever since. Sadly, 3 years ago she and her husband bought a house in a different town. Okay, it’s not sad for them, just sad for me. But even though we live 20 minutes apart, we still kept in pretty good contact. For a while. And then it was over a year since I had last seen her, and that was just completely unacceptable. So we made a playdate over a month in advance, and today was the day.
The kids and I drove over in the morning, and as soon as I saw her, it was like I had just seen her the week before. She is that kind of friend. After taking some time to catch up and let the kids play with each other, we headed over to Muri Moos for a picnic lunch. I had never been to this particular playground before, and it is really, really nice. Apparently, it was built by the residents of the halfway house on the same property. They use it as a sort of “model home” for their playground sets. If we had a yard, I would totally buy one. The kids had a fabulous time climbing, jumping, and basically running around.
After we polished off the delicious pizza, we took a walk around the grounds. This place is also a working farm, and is a large stork refuge as well. There are 26 mating pairs of storks who nest in the area. As we walked along the path, the kids had a blast counting all the stork nests. Each time we went around a bend in the road, we could see several more nests. They were on top of electric poles, on the tops of houses, on the top of the barns, in the middle of the fields. It was amazing. There were special metal poles set up for the birds to use as a base for their nests. Several of the kids found stork feathers on the ground, which they naturally took home for souvenirs. There is even a fun playground built right into the river, but it was closed due to the high water level. We will definitely be coming back.
And hopefully it won’t be another year before we see Pamela again!