Adventures in Deutschland: Day 21 - Triberg (the Black Forest)

We've been so busy traveling and having a good time that I've had trouble finding time to blog! But don't worry, I'll catch you up in the next couple of days...

Sunday my dad, Jan, Todd, Therese and I all took a train to Triberg in the Black Forest. The train ride was only a little over an hour and was beautiful. We saw deep valleys and gigantic trees. Once in Triberg we took a taxi to the city center, a nice tip we got from a small book on day trips I got. It saved us walking 45 minutes up hill. When we got to the city, we were greeted by over-sized cuckoo clocks and animated figures along with very "German" looking buildings - the type you would picture if you thought of Germany. It reminded me of Kings Island. I almost expected to hear band music streaming from speakers. More seriously, it was really cute and picturesque.

We immediately picked out the beer garden where we would dine after our visit to the waterfall - a nice place outside on a deck overlooking a small stream coming from the falls. There is water trickling in streams all over this town. You hear the rush of it everywhere and find it seaping through cracks in stairs. We climbed through the woods and over a footbridge, viewing these beautiful cascading falls from all sorts of angles. These falls have some seven levels and rush into streams strewn with mossy boulders in a way that looked too perfect to be real. I had to keep reminding myself that this was nature's work and not the hand of a set designer. It really reminded me of Lord of the Rings. There were more shades of green in this forest than I knew existed. Plus the white, clear water over the black rock.... Amazing.

After our hike through the forest and over some of the falls, we ate an amazing German lunch complete with beer, bratwursts, and potato salad. It was so exciting that I had to take a picture of it (as you can see below). After lunch we checked out some of the wood-carving and cuckoo clock stores. The Black Forest is well known for being the original and authentic makers of the cuckoo clock. I am now very well educated about the details one should look for in buying a cuckoo clock, all the way down to what the bird is supposed to look like ("Can you believe that bird they put in that clock? That's not even a cuckoo! It doesn't even have spots!"...How dare they...). Once we got the window shopping out of our systems (it took about two stores), we found a nice tea shop where we indulged in the much-anticipated Black Forest Cake. It's one of the specialties of the region, famed for its chocolate cake with cherry accents. In searching for this Black Forest delicacy, we all expected some nice, rich cake with really dark chocolate and dark cherries. Not quite. It was a light chocolate and white layered cake with a layer of cherries in the middle and some top. The cake was a really wet one, almost like authentic tiramisu. While it wasn't at all what I expected, it was REALLY good. Therese slept straight through our dessert so I didn't have to share :-).