The Ritterstrasse - #64

Mention the Ritterstrasse to anyone in Mainz with a miniscule sense of aesthetics and you'll generally be swamped by the effusiveness of their descriptive skills.

And it really is something quite special.

A road in the Oberstadt (Upper Town - you get the idea - a bit flash...) that's lined with flowering cherries forming a solid canopy of tender pink... Oops, classic case of being swamped by the effusiveness of their descriptive skills.

This year was short and sweet. Not to mention life-threatening.

The heatwave that we had last week pretty much turbocharged everything and instead of having a couple of weeks of splendour, it's lasted maybe a week.

And talk about dangerous.

It's normally a quiet suburban street, but they're upgrading a railway tunnel which requires them to commandeer the main drag into Mainz for close on a year (don't ask me..) and shunt the traffic through... the Ritterstrasse.

So it was a case of zipping out, composing and shooting and diving back to relative safety.

Thank goodness for autofocus...