Our home town of Giengen an der Brenz is located in the east of Baden-Württemberg on the border with Bavaria. Giengen is also said to lie on the foothills of the Swabian Alb.
Just a few meters away from our “home”, we can enjoy nature and stroll across sheep pastures and juniper meadows.
On the way, we met our shepherdess Marliese Stegmayer. The family business not only leads her sheep across our pastures, but also markets lamb and sheep meat as well as lambskins and other lamb products.
We are looking at the Hölltal valley. The formation of a “Hölltal” was a process that extended over long geological periods and was characterized by cold periods with intensive fluvial erosion and subsequent Holocene deposits.
The name “Hölltal” is usually wrongly associated with hell. In fact, the name is derived from “cave” or “hollow out”, which refers to the deeply incised, rocky sections of the valley. There are such hell valleys in Germany and Austria.
An der Hölle, as this part of the mountain is called, is where we used to race down with our sledges as children.
The Höllbach used to be filled with water and froze over in winter. But it has been dry for a long time now.
The Höllbach stream lies below this mountain and used to be filled with water. Unfortunately, it has been dry for many years now.
There are many small and larger caves in Giengen and the surrounding area. This one is right next to our toboggan run from hell.
My favorite tree! This lime tree already knows many of my secrets 😉
A great place where we often flew our kites in the fall.
At the beginning of the week, we had an appointment with WENNE in the workshop. The workshop technician looked at the brakes and said that at first glance they were still good. However, he found a problem with the rear brakes, which meant that they had virtually no braking power.
Like most garages, they don’t want to deal with our oil leakage because they don’t accept the responsibility of pulling the cab back a meter to tip it over. We have tried everything to get the master mechanic to take care of it. We don’t have the means to do this ourselves, as we can’t get the cab up and pull it back without the appropriate tools. He then said that he would talk it over again with his workers and take another look at the matter with him.
He said that everything should be done by lunchtime. He would also get back to me about the individual work steps and what might need to be done to the brakes.
As is usual with most garages, nobody contacted us. On the third day, Alex called them to find out how things were going. The answer was that the person responsible was not in at the moment and would only be back in an hour, but would contact us straight away. Just under 6 hours later, we received the call that WENNE was ready.
We immediately set off to get him.
As this ALB brake force regulator is no longer available to order anywhere for this old 1984 Iveco, the workshop first had to make a suitable part itself. In the end, the repair was successfully completed.
Unfortunately, this workshop also let us down with our problem of pulling the cab backwards to tilt the cab and deal with the oil leakage. We now know how to get the cab to the rear, but we don’t have the necessary tools.
We are pretty sure it would have worked, but nobody wants to take on this challenge.
We definitely won’t be driving much further with the oil leakage. We’ve already had a vehicle burn down once because of this, because we listened to the Opel workshop manager at the time and he said there was no hurry.
As always, Alex already has a theoretical idea of how it could work if we take care of it ourselves. Not easy and not possible on our own.
Alex also has no idea how to find and fix an oil leak in an Iveco truck. However, our junior is quite relaxed about it. He has a little experience from his work at Deutz Fahrzeugtechnik a few years ago.
Maybe they can solve the problem with this idea from Alex and our junior’s knowledge.
To make matters worse, while unpacking his car, a young man drove into the side of the rear bodywork where our motorcycle normally stands.
Unfortunately, the ramp flap no longer opens due to the impact. Just recently we had a problem with the flap not opening due to a shift. Alex only repaired it a week ago. The young man had a lot more damage and it was also his mother’s vehicle. We left it at that. We didn’t have much broken. Alex has the work, but he can fix it cheaply. The young man has a lot more damage, especially as he has to explain it to his mother somehow.
In the meantime, we were able to embrace our son and his girlfriend.
Our eldest daughter also came along with our son-in-law. Like me, she loves tortilla de patata and so we made one together. It was very tasty 😋
Our “sister-in-law” and our son-in-law’s sister play in the band Arizona Crossroads.
As Alex and I have been country fans for a long time and the band played nearby on Friday, we went there with our daughter and Benni after eating tortilla de patata.
This week I was also out and about with my mother. A visit to the doctor, a stroll, shopping.
We had a great day together.
Our junior celebrated his birthday at the weekend.
Everyone was supposed to bring something. I brought a poppy seed mandarin cake and a carrot salad. I love baking and it was really fun to finally bake a cake “normally” again and not for Omnia😂
It was great to have our kids, some of the family and friends around again that we hadn’t seen for a long time. It was a shame that our youngest daughter’s boyfriend had to work.
