Black Forest

A two day excursion into the Black Forest barely scratched the surface of the places to visit and hiking opportunities.

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Transportation from the Le Boat dock in Hesse mirrors the U.S. in that one either walks or drives. The ladies in the Le Boat office helped measurably by calling multiple taxi services until finding one that would take us the eight minutes to the Sarrebourg train station.

Once on the platform with the train announced for arrival, Theone felt additional allergy medication was needed for Robert and she took off for the pharmacy about a block away from the train station. The train arrived so Carol, Reed, and I boarded. We watched as Robert and Bobby remained on the platform for Theone to return. Amazingly, she made it back huffing and puffing with all three boarding just as the train pulled away.

In Strasbourg, we split up with some going to the voodoo museum and others taking a ride around town on the tram. Saying our goodbyes Carol and Reed remained in Strasbourg to catch a high speed train to the Paris airport in the morning and the remainder of us headed toward Germany in a rental car.

The 1-1/2 hour drive from Strasbourg in France to Freiburg im Breisgau (Freiburg) took us over the Rhine river. Even this far up river from were it empties into the North Sea the river is massive. Freiburg was an arbitrarily selected place to spend the night before visiting the Black Forest. The hotel on the Dreisam river turned out to be an excellent location to the old city center. We went looking for some place for dinner finding instead a square filled with people, music performers, and wine sampling tents - a wine festival was in full swing! We enjoyed taking in the people and activities going on. Looking for a place to eat sticker shock settled in. Dinner prices per person were €20+ not including starter and drinks. Any place with more reasonable prices required cash only. This is the theme in Germany. Where everywhere else in Europe preferred credit cards, Germany demands cash - which we were in short supply. Eventually we landed off the square at a quiet restaurant on a narrow street with outdoor seating and meals, though not inexpensive, were extremely delicious. Overall, Freiburg oozed charm with its old Bavarian style buildings, trams, cyclists, and people celebrating.

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Bobby and Robert went looking for coffee this morning and ended up exploring the city at length on foot. I had a coffee and pastry at a shop directly across from the hotel. By late morning we all gathered back together, piled in the car, and started the drive for our hotel in Wolfach, Germany.

Out route took us on winding narrow roads with plenty of exclamations when big lorry's passed us going the opposite direction. We stopped to take photos of a small ski lift, Bregtallifit Furtwangen. The countryside here is made up of steep rolling hills split between cultivated land and forested sections. We stopped just before the town of Triberg to visit the Triberg waterfall. Google routed us down a road, but a man on footed waved at us indicated we couldn't drive the car that way. So we parked the car and hiked the 1.5km to the falls. We learned several things as the hike and day progressed: 1) we could've driven up the road, 2) people were paying to visit the waterfall if they started in Triberg (which we didn't), 3) the falls have a paved trail from Triberg that zigs zags up the side of the falls to the top. The waterfall was a series of short falls dropping a couple hundred feet overall. Hydroelectricity has been generated from the area for over 100 years. Most of the original Black Forest trees were felled centuries ago for farm land or for timber forests. The area around the falls still has the original biodiversity. The hike through the forest was cool with lush undergrowth, very tall trees, and very few people.

Theone and Robert went for a swim at the local pool in Triberg. Bobby and I wandered down the Triberg main street and enjoyed a midafternoon lunch. We stopped and gawked at all the clocks in the 'House of 1000 clocks'. Then we pulled over to see the Ketterer Brewer as Bobby wanted a picture. Outside the facility lies a fountain dispensing the spring water used. It turns out the water is sold in bottles and we'd purchased some at the restaurant in Freiburg the previous night. A man was filling up many bottles from the fountain while we were there. Theone had her sights on the Sommerrodelbahn (translates something like 'summer sled train') a rollercoaster of sorts. It was a hoot! A little open car with a hand brake and seatbelts for one or two people sits on rollercoaster like rails. A cable pulls the cars way up on the side of the hill and then gravity pulls you down as the car bucks and turns on the rails. Theone and Robert road it three times!

We had to wait till about 7PM before we could check in at our hotel while and odd older man prepared the rooms. In broken English he made reference to a lack of employees due to COVID. Once the bags were in the rooms we drove into Wolfach proper and looked for a place to eat. All the restaurants that were opened only took cash. We ended up visiting the grocery store and bought stuff to make sandwiches; the grocery stores take credit cards.

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Our first top of the day was at the Schwarzwalk National Park and the All Saints Waterfall. The walk up alongside the waterfall had many stairs and ended at Klosterruine Allerheiligen, a historical church ruin. We stopped in Ottenhofen for lunch, but ran into the same lack of cash problem ending up back in the only grocery store just before it closed from 1-3PM. We did a little dirt road exploration through the Black Forest. We didn't find the lake we were targeting, but did find a cowboy hat perched on a stump. We paused at the Mummelsee lake tourist mecca at 1040 meters above see level. Finally within blocks of the hotel in Baden-Baden we missed a critical turn and found ourselves traveling for a couple of miles through a tunnel under the city. After we emerged the decision was made to visit the Baden-Baden Castle above the city. The castle is a ruin, but someone has installed stairways so that you can reach spectacularly high places in the castle with long distant views southwest toward Strasbourg and the entire Baden-Baden town. My knees shake for the people that laid the castle wall stones many hundreds of years ago so far up!

Once checked in, Theone and I enjoyed the healing thermal waters of the Freidrichsbad spa: a co-ed nude spa of increasingly hot and then cooling water baths