UADarthmaul's Travels: Germany 3: An amphitheater, then onto Gengenbach and the Black Forest. A three day report.

This is a three day update post. Two days ago, we crossed the river in Heidelberg, and hiked fifty minutes up a mountain. It began with a windy path bordered on both sides by a stone wall.

Eventually it opened up into a forest. At the top, we found a large outdoor amphitheater. As I just learned, apparently this amphitheater was built by the Third Reich in 1935, and on its commemoration, the propaganda minister of Nazi Germany described the theater as "national socialism in stone."

It was later used for theater, jazz music by American occupiers, and then other celebrations since. Just behind the theater was the remains of a monastery.

We backtracked down the road and continued in the other direction, toward Heidelberg's Philosopher's Walk. We stopped by two towers along the way. The walk itself had a small garden and had some more views of the town.

Once in town we stopped at a local camera store and I ended up buying a polarizing lens, in an attempt to end hazy zoomed in pictures in the future. We had lunch at a curry joint right next to the camera shop. We walked back to our hotel along the lengthy carless main street of the town.

We picked up groceries at a supermarket along the main street. We found something that would have been of interest to Miles there.

We arrived back at the hotel in the early afternoon and relaxed for the rest of the night. I read the second half of the ebook "The Last Year." It had a great premise but ended up being average at best. It was the first book I've ever finished on the kindle.

The next morning we checked out of our hotel and drove a little over an hour and a half to Gengenbach, in the Black Forest. We parked our car at our bed and breakfast, and went to explore the small town.

We tried to find lunch, but at just after 2:00 every restaurant was shut down. We stopped at a bakery, picked up some sandwiches and pastries, and headed back to our room. After a bit of rest, we decided to try to visit a local church that was supposed to give a nice panoramic view of town. I put the name into google and it said that it was 40 minutes away.

After about twenty minutes I grew suspicious and by thirty minutes I decided that it must definitely have been wrong. We weren't going up an incline and we were too far away from town. We decided that google's location was wrong and we turned around and went back towards town.

Back in town, we went to the tourist information office. The church that we had wanted to go to was visible from town.

We decided to leave near sunset to catch some good sights. I uploaded a hike that was recommended online, that intersected the church.

We left a little past 8:00, and climbed toward the church. On the initial incline we ran into the first sheep of the trip.

It had started to drizzle a bit on the way up, but we were able to take pictures of town from an overhang attached to the church.

We ended up walking half of the hiking route, and by 10:00 we were back in town.

We woke up the next morning to a large breakfast spread for two, in the backyard. The weather was perfect.

We took the 11:06 train towards the nearby town of Triberg. Triberg is known for cuckoo clocks and a large waterfall. Before going to the large waterfall, we decided to try a nearby smaller waterfall up the mountain to the side of town that I had seen on Google maps. As the trend would have it, we arrived and nothing was there. I asked a local where we could find it. He directed be back to the town and in the opposite direction. While writing this blog, I discovered that the location of the amphitheater on google maps is shown to be inside the monastery. Clearly nobody in Germany is making corrections to Google maps' errors. We will have to double check all things in the future.

Back in town, we took a look in the cuckoo clock stores. The biggest one was the House of 1000 Clocks, which featured a large cuckoo clock on its exterior, that had an animated bear climbing a rope.

Our final destination would be the Triberg Waterfall. We bought a one euro bag of peanuts, sold at the front office. We took the route of the nature trail, and the smaller trail that featured squirrels, which mostly overlapped each other. It took a little over an hour. What was unusual was that in town there was a small festival going on. During the whole walk we were able to hear the music of a marching band. It was a very unusual nature walk.

There were no squirrels. Stephanie ate the peanuts. The waterfalls were nice enough.

We returned to Gengenbach around 5:00, and left for dinner. We found a reasonably priced local restaurant. It is hard to describe, but you walked in fairly deep and the restaurant was surrounded on its side by houses, and had the ceiling retracted so that it was just the sky above.

I ordered gulasch soup, with something that was translated as "flame cake." Google translate would not translate the word with its camera, so I had to look it up separately. I had assumed the word meant pizza, because of the toppings that went with it. The waiter explained that flame cake was Germany's take on pizza, with a very thin crust and little sauce. I tried it. It was just ok. The cheese was thicker, though everything else was thinner. The music in the restaurant was very strange. At first, it was multiple Michael Jackson songs, slowed down tremendously, and then sung by a woman. This was followed by the theme song to Full House, with the same treatment.

The restaurant was mostly empty, but at a nearby table was seated a girl that spoke with an American accent. We began talking to her and then invited her to sit at our table. She was from Massachusetts. We talked for a few hours and then returned to our room near 7:30. We took a shot break, grabbed my camera, and headed back toward the church overlooking town. The previous night had part of the sky covered in dark rain clouds, so I wanted to take a look with a clearer sky.

A festival is occurring in Gengenbach as well this weekend, so we stopped by the main marketplace area of town, snapped some pictures, and headed toward the church. There was a stage set up, for musicians who played on and off all evening, which lasted to near 12:00. We heard music all the way up and all the way down. Most of it was very, very bad. It wasn't until we arrived back in town that they started playing what we thought of as traditional German music, which was much more reasonable sounding than what they had played before, which was grossly out of tune and just plain bad. I couldn't tell what was worse, the theme song to "Full House," or the non traditional German music.

I realized that this picture would be overexposed right after I took it. I tried to go back to retake it, but the kid started tugging on the dog to stand up. I loved the expression of the dog and the young girl.