Day Trip: Triberg & the Black Forest

It's been a pretty busy week in our home! One of Greg's friends from growing up and his wife came to visit for the week while they were touring Germany. Last weekend was a "4 day", so it gave us all time to hang out before I went back to work. Greg took the week off to show his friends around for a few extra days.

Most of the day trips we took were to places Greg and I had already visited before. The only exception was Saturday, when we took the Jeep down to Triberg in the heart of the Black Forest.

The Black Forest or Schwarzwald starts just an hour or so south of where we live. If you've ever seen tourist information for Germany or dig through the abyss of Pinterest's travel boards, you've probably seen some overly romanticized pictures of the Black Forest. It's a very quaint area characterized with rolling hills covered with dense trees and spotted with tiny German villages.  As it heads south, it slowly morphs into a much more beautiful area known as the Alps.

Always Jeepin'

Triberg is a small town in the heart of the Black Forest. It's credited with the creation of the Cuckoo clock. There is a giant store in the middle of town that is basically the epicenter of German cuckoo clock purchasing. When we arrived, there was a flea market going on and Greg picked up about 2 pounds of Legos and some vintage Lego people for 20 Euro. I bought homemade absinthe. Our friends bought a very beautiful cuckoo clock from the original* clock store, which is probably what most people go to Triberg to buy. Greg and I are obviously a little less predictable travelers.

One of the highlights of Triberg other than the clocks is the waterfall which is credited as the "highest" in Germany. It cost 4 Euro per person to hike up to the top of the falls. It's a pretty easy hike to the top with several landings along the way to take pictures.

I wore my clock shirt to the clock town and Greg wore his Jeep shirt to drive the Jeep. We're fashionable like that.

Once we got to the top, Greg's friend wanted to do some more hiking around the area. I will say this, there are some beautiful and well established trails for hiking in the Black Forest. The scenery was, in my opinion, pretty average, but the trails were great and obviously well maintained. I'm not sure if we'll ever bother to make the drive back to the Black Forest, but it we did, it would primarily be for hiking. Also, I'd make sure Greg and I got our encephalitis vaccines first because it's pretty much prime tick season in the Black Forest right now and tick-borne encephalitis is native to Germany. Anyway, backing slowly away from my soapbox...

On our way home, we took a quick detour to an area on the map that was listed as an "overlook" to take some pictures. It was pretty much just a road in the middle of some German farm land and houses, but it was a nice view.

Overall, Triberg was cool but I was personally unimpressed with the Black Forest region. It definitely did not live up to the romantic pictures in travel books and websites. However, we also moved here from Colorado where we had a 10 minute drive to some of the best trails and landscape in the Rocky Mountains. Our first out-of-country trip from Germany was to the breathtaking Swiss Alps, and I grew up in the Atlanta area where every park is a trail cut through a forest. Hiking through the Black Forest reminded me of hiking north of Atlanta as a kid. I actually found myself thinking that the Blue Ridge mountains were more impressive than the Black Forest. Our friends definitely enjoyed it, though, which was really the whole point of the day. It was also a nice way to get back to the nature we miss so much while living in the city. There is an area a little further south and east from Triberg that does tree camping which, again, if you have any interest in camping or travel you've probably seen pictures of. Greg wants to go, but the cost is 250 Euro per person per night. I'm having a hard time swallowing that cost just to sit in a tree for one night. We'll see.

I have a hard time believing this is the reality of tree camping.

We also took our friends to some local attractions, as well as Idstein to see the half-timber houses and a Jeep trip up through the Rhine river valley to see the castles. We stopped at Greg's favorite castle, Rhinefels, which I think we find more enjoyable than most other people do. Greg's friend wanted to go to Oppenheim to see where General Patton crossed the Rhine, and found out the hard way that you aren't going to find much WWII history in this part of Germany. After I went back to work, Greg also took them to Heidelberg (which we visited but I never made a blog post about) and Nuremberg. I was kind of fun to share the knowledge we've learned along the way through traveling with other people. I didn't realize exactly what all we've done and experienced until our friends wanted advice on what to go do and see.

Currently, I'm trying to put together something for the next 4 day weekend, but I can't decide what we'd like to do. Summertime is expensive for travel in Europe so we have to look at some of the less expensive destinations. I'm considering Prague, but only if we can get Augustus's passport in time to bring him along with us. Garmisch-Partenkirchen is another option, but the American lodge there does not allow dogs, which defeats the purpose of us staying in Germany in order to bring Augustus. We've also debated Berlin. We'll most likely end up staying home and taking a day trip or two instead.

The reason I'm hoping for a cheap getaway this summer is that, in fall, we'll be sailing the Mediterranean on a trip to Italy, Greece and Croatia! We got a really awesome deal through a travel agent that works with military families, and even got bumped up to a balcony suite because the room we originally booked was already sold. Hopefully, it will be a great time and the first "relaxing" vacation we'd had since moving to Germany.


*FYI, I have no idea if that is the "original" cuckoo clock store, but it seems relatively authentic