Wow, what another great day we had! We drove only about a half hour to a place called Horben where there was a cable car up the mountain Schauinsland. It is the longest cable car of its kind in Germany at 3.6 km long. We went up and up and up!
At the station at the bottom of the cable car, you could chose to buy a single way ticket or round trip. The map showed a lot of hiking trails, too. So I asked how long of a hike it was to the top if we only went one way. The guy said it was a 6 km hike, about 2 1/2 hours. We decided to go round trip on the cable car :-). At the top, there were various hiking choices, too, anywhere from a 45 min round trip hike to an 8 hr hike to the tallest mountain peak in the black forest! We took the short walk and it was really fun ... at the summit of the mountain, there was a tower to climb to get to an even higher elevation - what a view!
On our way along the hiking trail, we saw some brown cows, which was a highlight for Daryl (?), also some interesting carved wood sculptures.
Due to the elevation (over 1200 meters), it was quite a bit colder up there. We were thankful to have brought our sweatshirts! Except Daryl, who left his sweater in the car :-(. This is part of the reason we chose to skip the tour of the silver, lead, and zinc mine that was up there -- we were so cold outside, we really did not want to go into a dark, damp mine!
After we went back down the cable car (such a wonderful view!), we drove to another town nearby, Todtnau, for a "Rodelbahn". This is a tobbogon-type rollercoaster ride on a track that goes down a mountain. The track is over 2 miles long!! You take a ski life up to the top and then ride the coaster cars down. It was awesome!!
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| going up |
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| part way up |
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| from the top! |
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a view of the track from a distance!
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It was a really fun ride ... you could control your own speed, which was really fun! Alex and Mom rode together and Ben and Daddy in the next car. It was very intense! Alex's words were exhilarating and breathtaking.
Before heading home to our vacation cottage we stopped in Freiburg because Daryl's belt broke and he needed an new one before the wedding tomorrow! Also, after doing all our laundry at my Dad's house, I managed to leave all of Ben's underwear at his house, so we had to buy some new. Freiburg is a beautiful place!
We were lucky Maria had let us borrow her GPS -- it has been a life saver, getting us around everywhere on our trip down here! The one glitch was when I entered the Freiburg city hall (Rathaus) as our destination (that is always in the pedestrian zone, downtown shopping area), the GPS (we called her "Jane") had us turning straight into the pedestrian only street, and we listened ... finding ourselves the only car behind a streetcar among pedestrians only --- it was a bit scary until we were able to turn off onto a car road again a few intersections down! The driving was fairly hairy all day with lots of really narrow roads, steep inclines and hairpin turns up and down the mountains. Daryl was having fun!! He did better if he kept his eyes on the road and when there were trees on the side, instead of a visible steep drop-off.
After all this, we still got home before dark! Before our excursions, we also got to see my brother David and his wife-to-be Almut and baby Bela. More on that tomorrow, since I left that SD card in his laptop this morning - oops!
Tomorrow is the big wedding day!!! :-)
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