A day of Firsts!

Last night we received an email from Martine & Jean-Paul Krebs who own the holiday apartments where we're staying, inviting us for breakfast this morning at their Old Wine Press lounge.  We cordially accepted and went along this morning and were welcomed to an amazing buffet of fresh meats, cheese, bread and kugelhopf together with fresh fruit and yoghurts, coffee and orange juice.  

As this is our third visit here, each time staying in one of their apartments, it was nice to finally meet them as well as other visitors staying here (they have 15 apartments in total).  We got chatting to Ashley and Robin who live in Provence - Ashley is Canadian from Montreal and Robin is British, and also to Shelley & Doug and their two daughters who are also Canadian.

This afternoon we headed back up to the mountains to go for another snow fix, but we were surprised how much snow had fallen since we were there on Tuesday!  We were about 5 kms from the lake and made the decision not to go any further as we don't have snow tyres and the roads were white with deep snow drifts, so we stopped where we were, and spent a couple of hours enjoying the snow and the scenery.

On our way back to Riquewihr, we stopped off at another little town called Kaysersberg which we've never been to before.  It was another great find and is bigger than Riquewihr but still very quaint.  The area is famous for it's Storks and if you look up you can often see huge nests on the top of towers, usually empty, but tonight something caught my eye and it was a stork flapping it's wings - I'm so pleased to have seen one!

Our final port of call was back to the Winestub that I blipped yesterday and as we walked down the street, Mme Jung (or Dominique as we now know is her first name), saw us and gave us the most amazing welcome, kissing us on both cheeks.  It's a priviledge when a French person kisses you and also when you become 'Tu' rather than 'Vous' as you know you've been accepted as a 'local'.  Robin also turned up and he joined us for a drink, so it was nice to chat to him more after this morning, and then three drinks later, Dominik only charged us for two again!  

Anyway, back to my blip!  Apparently today is my 2,000 milestone, so I'd planned to have a snowy blip, bought a bottle of fizz and prepared a picnic, my idea being to set down a blanket and have the picnic in the snow, while setting up the tripod to take a selfie of us and the boys.  That idea quickly went out of the window though as I wasn't prepared for the wind which was blowing the snow so that it was swirling around and it was -2 degrees, - not quite the weather for a picnic!  So I quickly came up with another idea, which is actually perfect for such a celebration.

I've said it all before, so I won't repeat myself, but Blip is such a great community and I can't believe I've now posted 2000 entries!  So much has happened in that time and life has changed somewhat, but some great friendships have been formed with a lot of you.  So I'd like to say a big thank you for those of you who pop in regularly or from time to time with comments, stars and the odd heart.  I find it harder and harder to keep up with commenting, but I do look at your journals even if I don't get chance to comment and I enjoy seeing what you're all up to.  I did think I'd stop at this point, but I've said it before and it hasn't happened, plus I've got the new camera on it's way soon, so it would be a shame to stop wouldn't it?

Anyway, thank you again for your friendship and support, I'll now go and open that bottle and raise a glass to you!