Day 4: Germany- Triberg & Konstanz, Switzerland- Frauenfeld (July 12)

Eberstadt

Tram ticket. Travis and I each purchased one so we could take the tram and a bus to the train station.
Tobias has a "student" pass that allows him to ride all transportation for a 1/2-year fee that was SUPER cheap!

Can you see the name of this stop? It's at the end of the tram line and it's called "Frankenstein".
Tobias said that there is a keep on the hill that was part of the inspiration for the book.

Frankenstein Castle (Keep)
Yea, it looked particularly spooky with the thunderstorms that rolled through the two nights we stayed with the Megner's.

Riding on the tram: Travis (yes, looking a little tired and sleep-deprived)
and Tobias (in the background).

This was our train schedule that took us from Darmstadt to Triberg.
It's a beautiful train ride through 40+ tunnels and beautiful hills (mountains?) of the Black Forest.

Triberg
10:20 12 Jul, 2012
We are now on a train making our way to Triberg where we hope the weather holds out long enough for us to go hiking to see a waterfall adn maybe get a cuckoo clock in the Swarzwald (Black Forest). It's overcast and cooler today.

A map of Triberg.
The train station required exact change to put our luggage in lockers, and we were out of coins.
Thankfully we found some other tourist who were able to exchange for us.
We then rode a bus up the hill to the city.

15:50
When we arrived at the train station in Triberg, we had to get coins for the locker. And, I had to go to the bathroom badly. It was lightly raining so we decided to fork out more € and buy bus tickets. We got off up higher, at the top of the city. Travis asked a woman who got off at the same stop how to get to a WC (water closet, or bathroom) and the waterfall. She invited us back to her house to use her toilet (Danke shön!) and then she and 2 of her daughters walked us to the trail to the (middle top) of the waterfall. I got her mailing address. She's from Ukraine and came to Triberg because of teh war in the Ukraine. She brought her five kids. They were a wonderful family!
 

The pink 'H' is a "haupt" or stop on the bus line. We made the mistake of asking some teenagers when to get off to see the waterfall. They told us "the next stop" which was actually the pink H on the far right. It was at the top of the city, open fields around, no shops or people. We got off with another woman who kindly took us to her home and let me use her bathroom. She and her daughters then walked us to the Waterfall park entrance.

The waterfall was nice, but definitely "capitalized" with paved "hiking" trails and a cost of €3,50 each.

Eating our lunch at the top of the trail to the falls. We had bread with salami and cheese and apples.

Travis and I really didn't want to spend money on that, so we ate our sandwiches in the thinning mist (misty rain) and made our way down to the Hauptstraß or Main Street. By the time we got to the bottom of the falls, the sun was starting to shine!

Ummm, is that marijuana? We didn't think so, but it sure looked a lot like it.

Postcard view of the waterfall. I saw some of the splash (Travis said he saw most of this) of the cascade, but it was rather unimpressive. Especially compared to the freely accessible Bridal Veil Falls in Provo Canyon (Utah), the Snoqualmie Falls (Washington), and especially incomparable to Niagara Falls (New York)

It was SO GREEN, and we were blessed with some sunlight.

Here I am in front of the "free" view of the waterfalls.

Yes, there was more to the falls. But they wanted to charge us 3 euros each to go walk along a paved path to see them!
We decided we'd rather spend our time (and money) doing something different- like buying cake.

We went to a Master Craft's wood shop and bought a cucko clock as a gift to each other for our anniversary. :) We saw Haus 1000 clocks, bought some postcards and wooden Christmas Ornaments and some torte as we made our way down to the bahnhof on foot by the Fußweg (footpath). We got there just 15 minutes before our train arrived.

A piggy-back escapee from the forest fell on Travis as we were looking at Cuckoo clocks in the Master Tradesman shop where we bought our Black Forest Cuckoo clok.

See that GIANT cuckoo clock? Yes, it really did cuckoo on the hour. There was also a little song and some bears that moved. One climbed up and down a ladder round the clock.

The schwarzwald cake (Black Forest Cake) was a disappointment- layers of light chocolate cake between liquor-infused cream on top ofa piece of crust-cake-cherry fliing. Blech. Travis' himbeern torte was better.

See? Isn't this better than looking at a waterfall?
Well, my black forest cake left something to be desired... it was dry and I wasn't prepared for the alcohol in the whipped cream. Travis himbeer cake was super yummy, tho'.

Taken at the Triberg Train Station.
We walked down the hill and to the station. We were waiting for our train to arrive.
Yup, I'm the photographer.

See? Can't you tell I'm taking the picture?

Konstanz
10:00 14 Jul, 2012
When our train arrived we packed all our bags and hauled them (lugged them) aroudn Konstanz. We first foudn a post and mailed postcards to the girls, then walked to Marktstraß through Fischmarkt and over to the Münster (church) then to the Rhinesteg (narrow walkway) and started across the bridge to Seerstraß but turned back because the bags were to heavy for me (I was carrying my bags as a backpack and the cuckoo clock in the frog bag).

We arrived in Konstanz and walked through the Altstadt and looked at the oustide of shops and cathedrals. Because we arrived after 5pm, most everything was already closed. We were also hauling ALL our luggage around (which was HEAVY). We then walked half-way across the bridge and back down to the circle on the map following the dashed-line train tracks. Despite the heavy luggage, it was still a neat walk to see Lake Konstanz and some of the old town.

The Maja Bee!
I saw this in the post office while we were getting stamps to mail postcards to friends and the girls. I was already missing adorable little Maja, and was glad I got to see the bee her grandma had been talking about.

I loved this mural on the wall.I also wanted to show how much Travis looked like a pack mule.

Photo taken on the bridge, looking north. The water is from the river emptying into Lake Konstanz (to the right).

Travis took this picture. The land on the horizon (behind the tall trees) is Switzerland!
And, I'm also a pack-mule. The blue bag is holding Pringles and our Cuckoo Clock.

We then made our way back to the train station to meet with the Klaumüzners at a mall called Lago. The mall has a couple of grocery stores, the usual food shops, cinema, clothing stores. We looked for a camera store (located up the street somewhere in a plaza) for Jared, then ate dinner at a pizza place (YUM!). Travis tried alcohol-free beer, which was surprizingly less gross than he and I thought.

You probably can't see this very well, but this is a clock tower at the train station. It was really cool because it was a "digital" face clock: the second hand was actually a light that ticket around, and the hour and minute hands were also bright lights. It looked really cool.

Dinner at an Italian Pizza place (definitely different from any American pizza place!) with the Klaumünzner's. Jared is using my camera.

Travis trying his very first alcohol-free beer. I had a sip, too. It tasted like the slurry I make when I start my bread: yeast, wheat, sugar. Not unpleasant, but I still don't understand why people think this stuff is thirst-quenching or even palatable.

Prost!
Travis and Jared and their Bavarian Beer (ok, well, maybe not Bavarian, and not totally beer as it's alcohol-free)

We walked along the water (top left corner and bottom tiny middle picutres) and we walked past the Dom, bottom left corner. But, we didn't see the veiw that the main photograph shows.
But for the 2 hours we spent in Konstanz, I would love to go back and see more!

We walked back to Lago after dinner and ate ice cream (heidelbeeren= bluberry, erdbeern= strawberry, wildfrucht joghurt= mixed fruit yougurt for me). Jen and Jared needed to get some shopping done so we stopped at DM (a drug-store type place) and Aldi, which was bigger but very similar to our Aldi in Indiana.

Frauenfeld
We rode in the K's 8-passenger van to Switzerland, Frauenfeld and to tehir house, thier HUGE house: 5 bedroom, 1-1/2 bath, 3 floors, adn they are addign on! We were given Audrey's room to use while we're here. We met Evie (Genevieve), Nanau (Nathaniel) and Kaeley (their youngest) as the 2 younger boys were asleep.