Friday 1st July Schonach to Konstanz
With visitors gold card in hand we set off to become true Black Forest tourists. We boarded the free bus to Triberg and window shopped; this also entailed hanging outside the largest cuckoo clock for over 15 minutes waiting for it to do its stuff. The cuckoo itself was less than impressive but the life-size bears doing animated things were better.
Next on the list was to walk up Germany’s tallest waterfall on the path beside it, over it and around it. I can’t believe they charge people to do this, worse still I can’t believe we paid 7 euro to do it!!! At least we weren’t tempted to buy some peanuts for 1 euro to feed the squirrels, who quite frankly were so overfed that there were uneaten nuts everywhere. A more interesting sight was the number of overweight tourists who walked up the hill carrying kids, dogs, back packs and then sitting down at the top for a fag.
In order to reward ourselves for a few minutes of exercise we went to the Black Forest Cake café that claims to have the original recipe. Who can blame us; we are tourists and have appearances and standards to maintain. Although the café advertises everywhere that they, proudly, are the only holders of the original recipe the one person serving the multitudes was less than enthusiastic. No smile, no greeting, you don’t even need to ask for the cake, she just sees the tourist and goes “black forest cake to share?”, “drink?” “sit down”. When it comes to paying you get the bill shoved in front of you, no thank you, no goodbye... Maybe she heard us say the cake was crap. We can’t help it if we have adapted the Black Forest Cake and had expectations of more chocolate, real cherries inside (in fact any cherries inside) and something that tasted like fresh cream. Their cake had so much Kirsch taste I’m hoping for the driver that it was just syrup and not a liqueur.
After more walking around town and riding free buses we headed off south and east to get to Lake Constance via Switzerland. The German town by the Lake that we settled on to stay was Konstanz (Constance, in German I assume). This part of Germany and Schaffhausen that we drove through in Switzerland is a bit like no man’s land. You can freely go through the border and therefore people from all nations travel back and forth between the two countries. Konstanz and the lake are a popular holiday destination by car or boat so people from Austria, Italy, Germany, Poland and Switzerland come here for the weekend, as well as Kiwis in a German campervan.
We assumed because these towns don’t really have any sense of identity with one country, and are either drive-through spots or holiday towns, that they don’t have the same pride in their appearance. There were no lovely flower gardens, no maintained grass verges, the streets and paths were littered, and there were a lot of people just mulling around.
We walked into Konstanz from our centre car park that had parking reserved for motor homes. The town had an abundance of outside dining cafes that were all overflowing. We settled on an Italian place so we could watch Wales beat Belgium in the soccer on a TV outside in 24 degree heat, with 100 of our best friends all sucking on a cigarette.
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Germany's tallest waterfall
Triberg, Black Forest
Triberg, Black Forest
Big cuckoo clock in Triberg