Black Forest

     It's Friday morning and we are half way to Rome. We found out on Monday that Andrew might have the day off on Friday. On Tuesday this was confirmed and it was decided that we would use the three day weekend to see Rome. It is a 10 ½ hour drive to Rome from Bruchsal so trying to see Rome on a regular two day weekend is just not possible, We considered doing it just to be able to say we'd seen Rome but it would be a “drive there, spend the night, drive back” sort of trip. This way we have a chance to actually see some stuff. Not much – you need about a month to see all of Rome but we'll try to hit the major spots. Anyway, I have been busy all week trying to work out the details of our last minute trip to the Eternal City (that's something I never thought I'd be doing), so I didn't have a chance to finish the blog for last weekend.

     Saturday we'd seen the way that the royalty lived in the area (remember, we're back talking about Germany). Sunday we decided to see how the common folk lived hundreds of years ago. Another spot on our list of places to see was the German Black Forest, the setting of many a German fairy tale. In the Black Forest there is an open air museum – sort of like the pioneer villages we have back home except these weren't pioneers – they'd lived there for hundreds of years.

      We started our trip Sunday morning following the B500 through the Black Forest. It was a bright sunny day with not a cloud in the sky. The Black Forest looked impressive, big, and beautiful but not all that black. Still we found some breathtaking views of the tree covered hills along the way.

      At the museum we grabbed some lunch then started exploring the old houses. 

Andrew's giant brautwurst

Just outside the museum

      The open air museum consisted mainly of original buildings built in the 16^th and 17^th century and moved to this spot. Some of the houses had been used all the way to the mid-20^th century. In some of the houses the furniture and farm equipment was moved along with the house. So whatever was being used at the time the museum acquired the house was there too. Some houses had tools and furniture that the inhabitants had been using for hundreds of years before the museum took it.

Piper was not impressed with the comfiness of the bed

Piano!

We think this was for shoeing horses - it was outside the blacksmith's shop

      These old farmhouses were so interesting. They were very large but half of the building was actually the barn. The animals were kept in the same house as the people! The roofs where mainly thatch that came way down over the house so the upstairs rooms usually didn't have any windows. If it did have windows or a balcony, there wasn't much of a view. You could see the underside of the roof and the ground beneath the window.

In the barn section of the house

Kids practiced their milking skills

      Another interesting feature was the garage on the third story. Most of the houses were built with their backs to a hill. A driveway went up the hill in the back and into the house through a big door on the top floor. The front of this floor was used as the hay loft.

Walking out the third floor garage door

Sleigh in the "garage"

      The kitchens in these farmhouses were equipped with a fireplace/oven in the wall for baking. On the other side of the wall, in the area that the fire was actually located, was the a porcelain tile covered box. This would get nice and warm when a fire was going and heated the dining room. Some times there was another fireplace on the other side of the kitchen that heated the other room. Many of the porcelain tile sides had seats built right into the box. That would be the place to be on a cold Black Forest winter morning. It must have been a lot of work to bake bread because they only did it once a month. They had to make enough to last them the whole month.

      The farmers stored their food and valuables in a little storehouse located near their farmhouse. To outwit thieves, they'd put their really valuable things in a secret room behind a hidden door.

     When a farmer wanted to retire, he'd work out a sort of retirement plan with the person taking over the farm. They would draw up a written contract spelling out what the older couple would receive for the rest of their lives. Usually this was a room in the house, a cow, a goat, and small share of the crops, and use of the fruit trees. When the retired couple passed on, the now vacant room was leased to someone until the current farmer was ready to use it for his retirement home.

     And, of course, there were animals.

     There was also a small exhibit on the history of the cuckoo clock. The Black Forest is well known for its clocks especially the cuckoo clock. Whole villages were involved in the making of the clocks with different households being responsible for different parts of the clock. But the design of the original Black Forest clocks were very different from the cuckoo clocks we think of Black Forest clocks being. They had a porcelain face and no little birdie. In the mid-1800s a school dedicated to training clock makers was developed. A contest was held for a new design for the clocks and the winner was a design that housed the clock in a little hut like the ones along the rail road and included a little bird that popped out to announce the hour. The cuckoo clock was birthed and has since become the top selling Black Forest souvenir. (The tourist shops advertise their cuckoo clock inventory - usually numbering in the hundreds or even thousands.)

Old style Black Forest clocks

     We also got a look at the local fashion. The most notable fashion oddity of the area was the women's hats. The unmarried women wore straw hats covered with large red pom-poms while the married ladies wore black pom-poms on their hats. The brides wore beaded balls of various sizes (depended on how many beads they could afford, I suppose) tied to their heads with black ribbons.

     In one of the houses was an exhibit on the legends and fairy tales that were told in the area. Unfortunately it was all in German so we could just looked at the carvings and pictures.

Scary looking guy

Taran's impression of a tree face

     Lumber was a big industry in the Black Forest, not surprisingly. The museum had a couple examples of saw mills. Both of them had huge saws suspended vertically and a sled-like thing for the log to be pushed into the saw's blade. Both of them were powered by a water wheel. In the first the water wheel would pull the saw up and then the weight on top of the blade would push it down as the sled bearing the log was pushed into the blade. Then on the other one, the water wheel was hooked up to a camshaft that converted the circular movement of the water wheel into an up-and-down movement to move the saw. Made me think of the old melodramas where the heroine was tied to the log by the moustache-twisting villain. = )

     One of the little buildings was a bakehouse – a giant community oven. A little old lady in traditional dress was making little loaves of bread and holzenbroten – flattened out dough with small pieces of apple or black forest ham pressed into it and then baked in giant wood burning oven. We couldn't resist so we bought one of each kind. Yummy!

     On our way out we just had to sample the Black Forest cake. (Also a rather new item of the area. They started making this delicacy in the early 1900's. The first written recipe is only a hundred years old. I know that seems old but we've gotten use to seeing things that are several hundred, or even a thousand years old. One hundred isn't that impressive anymore.) The cake was delicious – they don't skimp on the kirsch. = )

First written recipe for Black Forest Cake

     We also got ourselves a bag of authentic Black Forest gummie bears. We had to try gummie bears from their natural habitat. = )

     Our next visit of the day was the Triberg Waterfalls, the longest waterfall in the world located in Germany. (That was Andrew's description.) Gertrude had a little trouble finding the place – it seemed like she wanted us to drive right onto the footpath up to the falls. We did finally find parking and paid our entrance fee (it costs to see waterfalls here!). Compared to Saturday, we had done very little walking and no mountain climbing all day. Well, we fixed that. The climb up the falls was challenging but we were rewarded with some beautiful views of the waterfall cascading down the mountain. And we saw the first squirrels since we left North America! (Not counting the one in the Berlin Zoo.) They are very different from our North American squirrels. Their coloring is more reddish, they're smaller, and they have larger, pointy ears with tufts of hair on the top. Cute little guys. The Triberg people are really proud of them. There were giant wood carved statues of the little guys and the ticket booth sold peanuts (Erdnuss in German) to feed them.

      At the top of the falls (at least as far as the kids would agree to climb), we stopped at a spot where Taran could put his feet in. The water was very cold so the rest of us were just going to sit on the rock and enjoy the beauty. Andrew went down to the water to see how cold it was – and boy did he find out. The rock that he chose to stand on was slanted toward the water. Seconds after he got on the rock he started to slide down the rock. There was nothing that he could do to stop the descent so he tried to control the slide and managed to stay upright – but he still ended up in the water up to his knees. He spent the rest of the day with wet pant legs, wet socks, and wet shoes. Taran, thankfully, took off his socks and shoes before getting his feet in. = ) He waded around for a while and tried to convince Piper to get in too but she was not in the mood to freeze her toes off that day. Then it was the hike down the falls and back to the car.

      By this time it was about 7:30 pm and we hadn't had any supper yet. We had heard of a lake not too far off where we had planned to end the day with a picnic and a swim. So we quickly headed in that direction thinking we could still get our picnic in. We knew the name of the town located on the lake so we put that into the GPS thinking we'd just find the lake when we got there. Not as easy as we'd hoped. It took some driving around before we found what looked like a public park next to the lake. There was a parking lot across the street that appeared to be free of charge on Sundays (yea!) so we parked, grabbed the swim suits and picnic supplies and headed into the park. There we found a sign prohibiting swim and picnicing! A park that you can't picnic in!? I didn't know there were such parks! And why have a park next to a lake and then not allow swimming! (You couldn't play ball or frisbee there either. Apparently it was only for sitting and staring at the water.) Arrgh!

      Looking across the lake, Andrew thought he saw an area suitable for our needs so we went back to the car to try to get to it. There we found a rather alarming surprise – the only way in or out of the parking lot was now blocked! If there was something posted warning of that possibility, we didn't see it. (Or it was in German and we couldn't read it.) Anway, we were stuck! The entrance to the lot was up a little hill. The gentle decline path was blocked but it was still possible to go right off the side of the hill, the steep way down. When I say possible, I mean that is what we were hoping. What else could we do? There was no one around to ask and we couldn't wait till the lot was opened in the morning. So down we went – Andrew and I holding our breaths and the kids squealing. It wasn't the smoothest exit but we made it. The car got a few grass stains on the bumper and some grass clumps tagged along on the underside for a few kilometers down the road but otherwise survived none the worse for wear. = )

     We spend about 15 minutes looking for the picnic permitting park by the lake but, though we went every possible way we could, we could not get to that side of the lake. It was 8:30 now and we still had to drive home so we gave up and ate sandwiches in the car on the way home. A disappointing end but still a fun day.