Too early in the morning, we got ourselves up and back into the car. We made a quick driving tour around the beautiful Strasbourg Cathedral, admiring the clean streets and Sunday-morning breakfasters in the many corner cafes. Then it was back across the Rhine River into Germany to make it to church in Freiburg.
The Strasbourg Cathedral. Not my photo-- it was so hard to get a good photo of the cathedral because of the many buildings the are built up almost to the base of the building.
Freiburg is a beautiful city, right at the base of the Black Forest mountains. There is a university and another beautiful cathedral. We went to church there in a small LDS chapel near the university. Everyone was so friendly and impressed with the boys' German skills.
After church we went on a short walk around the cathedral before getting in the car and heading up into the mountains.
Freiburg Cathedral.
Apparently the Freiburg Cathedral is famous for its gargoyles. Some of them are rather... questionable.
Just a few minutes after getting in the car and starting up the mountains, we heard a loud POP from the back of the car. I'd heard that sound before. It was not a welcome sound. My wheelchair wheel inner tube had popped! We thought about going back into Freiburg to try and find a bike shop where we could buy a new innertube, but the shops we tried calling were closed, so we decided to forge ahead, and deal with it later.
The drive up through the Black Forest was stunning. We felt like we were in one of the Grimm fairytale forests!
We stopped in Furtwangen to tour the Deutsches Uhrenmuseum (German Clock Museum). The Black Forest is cuckoo clock country, and there were a lot of them in the museum! Actually it was a really interesting museum featuring the history of clocks from the earliest models to the most modern.
The Black Forest was beautiful. Driving through picturesque little villages like this really made us feel like we were in a different world.
We drove to Triberg to see the largest waterfall in Germany. Germany apparently doesn't have terribly big waterfalls, because it wasn't that impressive. :-) But it was cool and green and the boys were happy to get out of the car for a while. Ben carried me on his shoulders a good way down the mountain before coming back and driving with me down into the town to pick up the boys.
Also not my photo, but a better view of the falls
And it was good timing because right about when we picked up the boys, it started raining HARD.
Darkness fell as we drove northwest, down out of the mountains, and it really did feel like the Black forest. We crossed back over into France, going through a road block of sorts, manned by French protestors protesting... something. Some agricultural something or other. And then it was a straight shot through the eastern edge of France, back into Germany, and then to Sainkt Goarshausen where we got into our hotel, Pohl's Rheinhotel Adler, way too late (midnight, I think).
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