May 22 - The Black Forest

We drive along through the Black Forest, riding through such beautiful little towns. Today is another religious holiday, but we cannot find out which holiday it is. I'm guessing that it's a saint's day. We are in a tiny town called Schwarzwald, and there is a beautiful church, with its bells ringing. Then another town called Saint Margen, and yet another glorious church. Because of the religious holiday, all the shops in both towns are closed, but everyone living in the towns is either marching in the parade headed towards the church, or they are gathered on the sidewalks to watch the procession.

In each town, there are small children dressed in white, teenagers dressed in traditional German costumes, and elderly ladies in floral hats and black dresses. In front of every house in the towns, there are branches of evergreens laid out on the walkways, and vases of fresh flowers are on every windowsill and doorstep. In the center of the towns, and also in front of the churches, there is a tapestry of flower petals set down in the middle of the road-- an intricate room-sized design completely made from colorful petals of all sizes, shapes and colors. It is beautiful, more so because by the end of the day, the breeze will have laughed at its attempt at permanence. I look at the design for the longest time, because I know I will not find this on a postcard.

Our next stop is Triberg, and "The House of 1000 Clocks." This is a tourist-y shop, which is not closed because of the religious holiday. This large store is filled with cuckoo clocks of all sizes, from tiny ones that you can pin on a lapel, to huge ones that look as if half a tree's worth of wood was used to complete it. We look at all of them, and my husband watches a video of a carver making an ornate clock. My husband is not alone-- every other man in the store is also watching this video. The women in the shop are browsing and shopping. I find my favorite cuckoo clock, my husband finds his. Both are expensive, more than we want to spend. And do we really want a cuckoo clock? My husband takes photos of the clocks that we like, and I buy postcards. My stack of souvenir postcard is now nearly six inches thick.

Still in Triberg, we stop to see the highest waterfall in Germany. We pay a couple of Euros each to walk down a trail which brings us to one of the landings where we can see part of the waterfall. The walk is long and the trail is steep, and slick from the sprinkling of water. My husband wants to walk all the way down, to get the best picture, but I opt to sit in the wooden gazebo on the second landing and enjoy the view from there. After he gets the picture, we both walk all the way back up the trail towards the car. We've seen other waterfalls, in Maine, Australia, Hawaii, to name a few. This one was okay, but not worth the Euros it cost to see it, and not worth the walk to get there: 20 minutes walking down to it, 50 minutes walking back up.

We find a small cafe nestled in the mountains. The parking lot is filled with motorcycles and expensive cars. The motorcyclists here take their driving seriously-- they are all covered from head to toe: helmets, black leather jackets and pants, black boots, elbow-pads and knee-pads. We have seen countless groups of motorcycle riders in every town and city that we've visited. We stop at this cafe and have hot potato soup, served with delicious bread. Even in this tiny cafe in the middle of the Black Forest, there is homemade soup and hand-baked bread.

With all the driving around this country, we have not seen one dead animal in the road. Not a squirrel, not a deer, not a bird. We have seen very few squirrels, even in the parks. The few we have seen have been reddish in color, with furry pointed ears. The birds sing us awake every morning, and it seems that there should be hundreds of them, but we have only seen a few from time to time, and they look like ordinary sparrows to us. We never did see the bird that makes the famous "cuckoo" sounds.

Our next stop that day was a town called Furtwangen. My postcard of this town shows exactly how it looked... white houses with red roofs, set down at the base of the Black Forest. We stopped here for one thing-- their clock museum. Thousands of vintage and new clocks of every size, shape and design you can think of. They also had vintage music boxes, and we were lucky enough to catch a demonstration of their wonderful calliope-styled boxes. My husband's dad used to collect clocks. He would have loved this museum. Before we leave, I buy two postcards which show two of the calliope music boxes. Each of them is big enough to sit on a carousel and provide the music for the ride.

Before we leave this area, we find The World's Largest Cuckoo Clock. It is a house-sized clock, set off the road towards the main highway. The house/clock is very ornate, with figures in the windows, piles of wood on the porch, a dog sitting by the door. It is 5:50 in the evening when we find this huge clock. Would it chime at six? Would the figures move around in the doors and windows? Too good to miss, if it does, so we decide to wait. We were rewarded at six o'clock... chimes from the clock, cuckoos popping in and out of the tiny windows, the carved figures moving and dancing through the doors and around the porch, the dog opening his mouth in a silent bark, even a chimney-sweep popping up in the chimney and tipping his hat. Wonderful! My husband took pictures of all the action, but because of the church holiday, the little stores near The World's Largest Cuckoo Clock were closed, so I couldn't buy a postcard.

We then got onto the main highway, headed towards Trier, one of the oldest towns in Germany. We had dinner that night at a restaurant on the autobahn. It was called "Axxe," and seemed to be Germany's equivalent to our Howard Johnson's restaurants. This day was our longest driving day. We didn't get into Trier until ten o'clock that night... enough time to find our hotel and fall into bed. My husband was determined to start the morning in Trier, rather than stay the night somewhere else and then have to drive to where we wanted to be after breakfast.