The Black Forest

-
Steve's work has taken him to Germany for a week. Since our wee beasties are already staying at a holiday cattery whilst we reside in a hotel, it made sense for me to come along. I've never been to Germany before. We're staying in Freudenstadt, which is about 90 minutes from Stuttgart. It's in the northern reaches of The Black Forest.

We had a free day when we first arrived and we went in an adventure. The first part was a drive along The Black Forest Ridgeway from Freudenstadt to Baden Baden, a 60 kilometer drive through the forest.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A comment about the photos: Most of these photos were taken with my Canon DSLR. I have still not made time to learn the camera properly, so I'm in auto mode or close to it most of the time. The camera has really good sensors, and a lot of them, so it's great at auto focus. Perhaps too great. The camera and I are at odds on what is the focal point of the shot. I thought I was overriding the sensors, but I wasn't doing as good a job as I thought. So in many of the distant forest pics, the trees are out of focus and the plants in the foreground are crystal clear. I will get better. In addition, I thought my iPhone took pretty good photos until I compared them to my DSLR ones. Boy was I wrong!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


An iPhone shot as we zoomed along in the car. This is The Black Forest. To be honest, we were expecting more. While these views are pretty, we have similar in Scotland, so we don't understand the big deal. Maybe it's because we only saw the northern part of the forest, and from a road that was above the trees more often than in them. We missed all the towns and villages, and we think that's why we weren't overly impressed. We will reserve final judgement until we see more.

Another car shot. Apparently not even The Black Forest is immune to the timber industry.

We stopped to take some proper photos.

Someone got creative with a tree stump.

The variety of flowers growing wild by the roadside was staggering.

These flowers reminded me of pom poms.



These shots are from several miles further along the road. This is some sort of quarry.

It is beautiful.


Some more flowers.


Back to the iPhone. I really like all the flower boxes in use. This was in Baden Baden at the end of our Black Forest Ridgeway drive.

This is a Russian Orthodox Church in Baden Baden. I found some others photos of it online. It's very pretty.

An alley in Baden Baden.

After Baden Baden, we hopped across the border into France and spent some time in Strasbourg. That's the subject of my next blog. On our way back from Strasbourg, we went back through the forest. We also traveled through some farm land. What intrigued me most about the farms was their diversity. Rather than plant acre after acre of say corn, they would have some corn, fruit trees, and other crops sharing the space.

We came across this open area high in the forest. A lot of people were parked here. At first we thought they were just enjoying the lovely view.

But we quickly realized we had stumbled upon a paragliding launch point.

The area must have excellent conditions. This paraglider soared around for several minutes before he descended into the valley and out of sight.

I'd be having a coronary if I was in that contraption.

I couldn't resist taking a photo of Steve taking a photo of the forest.

This is one of the diverse farms I mentioned previously. See all the different crops he has growing on the hillside? They include grapes, peaches, and other fruit trees.

Here's a slightly different angle as we got closer.

An old railroad bridge.

A little settlement.

I'm not sure which town this is, but I found its quaintness worthy of a quick snap.

Scotland is rife with wind farms. Steve considers them a blight on the landscape. They don't bother me, though. Germany is apparently experimenting with the idea. You stumble across a lone windmill every now and then.































Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Time to drop the curtain

-
When my Mom passed away in March 2018, my zest for this blog fell dramatically. She was my biggest fan and enjoyed combing through the photos I'd post. But I tried to continue on because my Aunt Jody also enjoyed the blog. Well, she passed away early last year. It's time to call it for this blog. The hubby and I moved to Ireland late last year and I have ideas for an ex-pat in Ireland blog. When we were considering the move, I found little current blogs on the subject. I'm thinking maybe I can fill a gap. But Back and Forth Across the Pond is done now. It was fun and I hope you enjoyed it. Hail and well met. Deanne
Read more

Inverewe Gardens

-
Image
We stopped at Inverewe Gardens on our way home at the recommendation of one of Steve's work mates. It's a property within The National Trust for Scotland, so admission is free to Trust members. We had been pondering joining since we first moved here and decided to just bite the bullet and sign up whilst we were at the gardens. We only have to visit about four more places to have the membership pay for itself. Since the Culloden Battlefield near us in Inverness is part of the Trust, and our membership also grants us access to England's National Trust locations, we figure our membership will end up saving us quite a bit within the year. Inverewe Gardens was once the estate of Osgood Mackenzie. He built his mansion house on a rocky promontory overlooking Loch Ewe in the mid-19th century. He dreamed of having a walled garden of flowers and vegetables and set about excavating a raised beach and building retaining walls and terraces. By 1870, Osgood had created a productive gar...
Read more

Bus, Wall, Pavement, and Park: A Wander Around York

-
Image
The heatwave finally came to an end on our final day in York. It was offered much appreciated relief. We had afternoon tea scheduled in the mid-afternoon, so we broke our day. The morning included an open-top bus tour and a wander along the city's medieval wall; and the afternoon included a stroll through a surprisingly expansive park. We bought a ticket for one of the ubiquitous Hop On-Hop Off bus tours. Pretty much every major city has one of these. Heck, Inverness has one! The ticket is good for 24 hours, so you can actually use the bus as transport if you want. That had been our original intention, but we ended up just doing the hour-long tour and that was the end of it. But we enjoyed it. And I saw bits of York I had never seen before. And learned some interesting tidbits. The tour was broadcast in English, but if you had headphones you could select other languages. Like Kids English  and Yorkshire. When the "bus" part of the day was o...
Read more