(you can get the large version by clicking here directly.)

finally.

almost over. decending, soon, vanishing beneath the horizon. a last glimpse of its beauty, before it is gone.
goodbye sun, see you tomorrow.

this is not the first night it snows – yesterday, flakes fell down as well. but this time, the snow is staying. not for long, i’m afraid, but at least for a little while. time to go outside and enjoy it, which i just did. not yet enough to play in it (that probably has to wait until the end of the year anyway), but great enough for some hopefully nice photos. enjoy!

yesterday, we did the panoramic hike near braunwald. on the first leg, from grotzenbüel to gumen, was really nice. it was sunny, and thanks to chinooks it was also pretty warm. around gumen it started to drip a little, and it got more cloudy and foggy and essentially stayed like this until we were back down. on the higher levels we found larger patches of snow, most of them not on the path, but some also crossing our path; on the way down, we had to climb over a larger snow hill crossing the path. but we survived it, and alltogether, the great scenic views on the first leg were worth the whole effort. though it would have been nice to just take the chair lift down from gumen, which unfortunately wasn’t in operation this time of the year. the following photos are a few impressions:

back in braunwald, we discovered this cute hydrant:

finally, on the train ride back, we did a stop-over in schwanden to drink something. on our way, we found among other funny tags this particularly cute one:

finally, a few meters from the tag, on a small staircase up, we found this:

this sunday, i was in elm at the glarner alpchäs- und schabziger märt, a kind of folk festival where you can have fun, try and buy cheese, eat traditional food, listen to bands playing folk music, and as a highlight, watching an almabtrieb. during the latter event, the cows from the alms are driven back into the valley, where they are decorated and equipped with nice cowbells, and walked along the main street so the tourists can watch and take pictures ;-) below are some impressions from that day with wonderful weather, opposing the foggy, cool weather i left behind when leaving the zürich area…

in the last photo, you can see the martinsloch. we didn’t knew the sun was shining through that morning (around 9:33 o’clock), otherwise we probably would have been there earlier…

today, i updated my gallery code. it now features a “pop-up version”: if you click a photo, it will be shown with a black background, and as soon as you click anywhere, you’ll return where you just were in the blog. you can still use something like firefox’ double click to open the photo in a new window, and the “fullscreen” viewer includes a link to the image file (and instructions on how to get rid of the fullscreen view as well as a copyright notice). if you don’t like the new viewer, you can explicitly disable it by using the new settings menu in the sidebar. there, you can now also more prominently toggle whether you want to see the thumbnails always in colors or not. finally, changing the thumbnails now also works without javascript enabled.
i’d be happy about a bit of feedback, in particular if the new gallery fullscreen viewer works in your browser. i so far tested it with firefox, konqueror and chromium, so it should also work with safari and chrome, but i’m not so sure about the internet explorer… in case it doesn’t work (and if you’re using the internet explorer, also please in case it works) tell me your browser and its version number so i can investigate a bit… (in case you’re using an old internet explorer, you should better change to a newer version or a different browser, as it is very broken anyway.)

today i flew back to zürich, via frankfurt. on the second leg, i was sitting at a window, and after some time, a beautiful cloudy sunset scenery presented itself to me, which i have to share with you:

after diving through the clouds, it wasn’t that beautiful anymore, instead it was grey, cool and looking rainy… but well, vacation’s over, isn’t it?