Day 6: Black Forest - Staufen

The Black Forest is beautiful - known for cuckoo clocks and the famous chocolate cake with cherries - neither of which we bought, although we came to Germany thinking we wanted to take a cuckoo clock home. But they are so expensive and the somewhat affordable ones you have to wind daily, so we passed.

We didn't really "do" anything in the area, just drove the beautiful windy roads and switchbacks through the hills - it really is beautiful. Dairy cows, goats, and sheep on the hillside and amazing views. We took the scenic route around Freiburg - through tiny towns of St. Margen and St. Peter - to get to Staufen, where we'd decided to stay for the night. We drove to Kandel peak - where we could see for miles and miles, and where it was freezing - 7 Celsius (about 44 plus major windchill factor). There are lots of cyclists on these crazy hills and paragliders take off from this peak.

We had called Bahnhof Hotel earlier in the day, trying to reserve a room. They speak zero English so I tried my best at - "Wir hatten gern ein zimmer." (we'd like a room). Her response of "Ja" and what seemed to be "40 euro" gave us hope we'd have a bed that night in this sleepy little town. We arrived pretty late and found the place, the little lady was seriously the smallest adult I've seen, cute little German woman who couldn't be more than 4" tall. It was a funny little place and our room had a large poster of the Matterhorn -foreshadowing our next stop on Switzerland. (chris has never heard of the Matterhorn... He's never been to Disneyland.)

It was late and getting chilly, the town extremely quiet. So we just walked around a bit and found the only open restaurant - Konhaus or something. It was a bit more than we've been spending but chris' favorite meal yet (pork medallions with homemade noodles) and tied for first for me, along with my salad with goat cheese and honey in Bacharach. Salads take on an entirely different form here - it's lettuce and so much more and all piled sort of separately on your plate, with various dressings or marinades on each part - if that makes sense. This one had salad, carrots, white carrots, purple cabbage, tomatoes, cucumbers, then hot mushrooms and poultry (they described it as bigger than a chicken but not a turkey?) And of course the beer was great!

This picture is the eating area outside our "hotel" - it's a restaurant too and they have a booth made out of a huge wine barrel (I want one of these). Grapes are clearly the cash crop around here and the wine trade is what made Staufen rich and keeps it alive today.