Our Bavarian (white) Easter

Unfortunately for our mental health, it is still winter here in Bavaria.  Though my sources were right in that we had the snowy Easter holiday I was dreading in my previous blog.  However, that didn’t stop us from having a great time with family nor slow us down on our snow covered Easter egg hunt.  After one less hour of sleep thanks to daylight savings, we set out to the town of Benediktbeuern on the edge of the lower Alps with Aunt Ellen and Uncle Rüdiger.  Benediktbeuern is a picturesque little town where Rüdiger’s brother lives, with an apartment with a view of the Alps (or at least Ellen says – the clouds blocked everything out). 

Once we arrived, the brothers headed out into the snow to hide 32 eggs.  When an hour passed and they still weren’t back, I knew we were in for a difficult egg hunt.  Finally it was time to venture out into the woods for my first ever Easter egg hunt. 

And because they use real hard boiled eggs here (not the plastic ones full of money or chocolate that Julie grew up with), the egg hunt felt more like a survival search for food as we roughed it through the snowy wilderness terrain digging for eggs.  Luckily (and unluckily) there were slopes too steep for snow, so this helped (and hindered) finding some of the eggs.

Rüdiger is apparently so good at hiding the eggs that it is pretty much expected 15% of them will be lost forever.  Let’s just say the snowy conditions got the best of me because in the end I only found 3 out of the 30 eggs that were found.  Of course Julie was the winner finding 10 eggs or 33% (and yes, there were 5 of us searching).  Later she told me that she had collected only 6 eggs and was ready to give up searching when the announcement was made that we could not leave until the rest of the missing eggs were found.  We were both afraid we would be out in the woods forever!  As she was rather hungry (always good motivation), she kicked into survival mode and quickly found 4 more eggs while the rest of us just poked around senselessly.   In the end only 2 eggs went missing, a loss of 6%, which was thought to be one of the best recoveries they have witnessed (thanks to Julie's participation!). 

 

At last we were allowed to return home and have our Easter feast of green soup, salad, quiche, and my favorite part- American cupcakes (one of the many sweets options)!