Winter has come back to East Germany and I decided to take Anna for a walk along the Elbe river in the city of Magdeburg. Just past the Herrenkrug Hotel we follow the Elbe river. The water level has risen far enough to flood parts of the park. You can see a park bench and a bin in the river here:

Click to enlarge:
 

Every now and then I take a second for a little training session. Anna loves those “games” that always end with a treat!
Here I’m trying to teach her to crawl, hardly recognizable in the photo, but she does it quite well already.

Anna taking the “The Road Less Travelled” in the forest of Möser:

On another walk through Magdeburg’s Stadtpark (city park), crossing a bridge at sunset.

In the winter months the sun is hardly rising from the horizon, it almost feels like morning all day. The temperature has sunk to -10 degrees Celsius and the lakes are frozen. Anna ran onto the ice during our walk and of course broke in. Luckily she was close enough to the shore, she got herself out without even getting her feet wet. The noise of the cracking ice almost gave me a heart attack.

The Pavilion:

Being a Retriever, Anna picked up a stick and proudly carried it while walking around me in circles. I started playing tug with her and the stick until I finally told her to let go, so I could throw it for her. Only then I realized, I wasn’t holding a stick in my hand! I was holding a frozen duck leg and foot, still with some feathers attached! “Ewww”, I screamed, looking at the orangy colored leg in my hand. She just loves birds! The birds flying in the sky, the ducks in the lake or the birds shuffling through the ground searching for food and flying from branch to branch. Her eyes always follow them, sometimes her instinct will make her chase them.