Banjo and everyone got a little stir crazy this week. Things were busy and he didn’t get as many walks as he likes. So on Saturday we decided to make it up to him. We took him out to the Schloßpark Stammheim. The park was part of a medieval manor at one point, and while Schloß means castle, I’m not convinced that there was ever an actual castle here. The house that was here in the late 1800s was quite impressive though.
The park is about 2 miles from our house, and the park itself has quite a lot to see. We started out at about 11:45, hit up a bakery near the park at 12:30 and then returned home by 5. Caroline and Ryan’s step counters said the total trip was about 6-7 miles.
The kids were initially disappointed when we told them that the park wasn’t a play park / playground, but once they saw the statues they really had a nice time. There are a lot of types of statues from large carved wooden people, to steel abstract shapes, to funny deconstructed log benches. The variety is very nice, and the park doesn’t get boring since you never know what the next corner will hold.
Banjo was not the only dog at the park this Saturday. There were a lot of people out with their pets. Most of them were friendly, but Banjo did exchange some growls with a few of the more aggressive dogs.
It was nice also that the park itself is very shady and right on the Rhine. Even though the day was hot and sunny, the park was cool and a bit breezy.
Check out the photos below for some of the walk highlights, and the video above for some of the kids reactions.
Bonus fun facts for the day:
- We say “Cologne” in English, but in German it’s Köln. However, if the umlaut-o (ö) is unavailable, the correct spelling is Koeln. For example, the city website is stadt-koeln.de.
- ß is named “Eszett”. It is its own letter, but can be written as two s’s, if needed. So Schloßpark can also be written Schlosspark if the ß is unavailable.
- The letter ß didn’t have a capital version until 2017, and many fonts do not have the capital ß available. The correct behavior is to go from Schloßpark to SCHLOSSPARK when capitalizing. This is one of several complicated cases in programming where letter transformations are one-way. There is no way to tell if a double SS should be converted into an ß or ss when converting back to lowercase.
- Switzerland and Lichtenstein have gotten rid of ß, officially. Anything that uses ß in Germany would be written with ss in Switzerland.
