The Black Forest

One thing I recommend when travelling to unknown places is to get a book with the details of the areas. I went to the library and got 5 books for our travels. We all have spend hours perusing through the books and they have given us some insight on what to see and where to go! Reading about Western Europe, Germany, Netherlands, Munich and Austria has helped us decide where we wanted to go and what we wanted to see!

We knew in advance that we were driving to Germany, but weren't exactly sure where....I thought Berlin, but after checking out some of the literature, it was decided that we were heading to the Black Forest - 200 km mountain range in south-western Germany. The Black Forest is famous for its Black Forest Cake - no joke! Although we all wanted to taste some of this famous cake (especially Linda), we never had the opportunity!

We left Friday morning and headed towards Germany. Funny when you leave Brussels, you can pass through so many countries in a little amount of time! We drove through Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and arrived in Germany late afternoon. No one was expecting it, but Germany was very snowy in some places and filled with blooming flowers in other places!

We followed the directions that 'Donna' gave us (Donna is our fake GPS via CD - who would say stuff like "drive straight 500m and make a u-turn if possible") towards the Black Forest and ended up passing through some wonderful towns along the way. We took the scenic route which allowed us to see some great places that we may not have been able to see otherwise. We arrived at Baden-Baden and drove to Fruedenstadt in the afternoon and then up a mountain where the roads were so bad that we ended up turning around and taking another route. The rental cars here hardly ever see snow, so the tires weren't great and there were a few people stuck ahead of us....I was extremely glad to get off the snowy mountain with the narrow twisty roads - my heart couldn't take it! The picture above was taken in Shiltach which was said to be the 'prettiest town in the Black Forest' and it lived up to this standard! We stayed in Triberg that night in a small quaint hotel along side a waterfall. Triberg gets its name from the 3 mountains that meet at this little town. This is where the 2 largest cookoo clocks in Europe are found (see pic below).

At 9am the next morning we went to see the big cookoo clock 'coo'....it was funny. When we went into the store we thought they would all be going nuts at 9am, but it ended up that they all had different times set so they went off randomly every few minutes. Cookoo clocks are all handmade here and were very nice, but not necessarily nice enough to buy one (they ranged from about 100 e to 3500 e).

On Sunday morning we continued through the Black Forest and headed towards Austria. We drove through the Alps which is one of the most amazing sights I have ever seen! It was quite surreal being surrounded by snow-capped mountains and some of the nicest scenery I have ever seen!

This trip was filled with lots of laughs, sights and some great times with Dylan's family!