Part 2
November 23
We drove to the German/Swiss boarder today. On the way south, we drove through the Black Forest. It was a beautiful drive, but much of the scenery was ruined by unsightly electricity generating windmills rotating slowly in the breeze. I am all for alternate energy, but these white monstrosities that flail air at the slightest provocation, are not as carbon neutral as progressives want us to believe, and they are a scourge on the beauty of God’s earth! The road was narrow and wound back and forth though the mountains and rolled through quaint little towns that shunned modern development. I liked it that way!
I was amazed at all the saw mills still in operation in the Black Forest. Some of them had hundreds of thousands of board feet of lumber stacked outside waiting to go to market, and each one had a mountain of logs awaiting their fate with the bandsaw.
It reminded me of Montana five decades ago, when my family moved to the Bitterroot Valley. There were sawmills, large and small, all down the valley from Missoula to Sula. They are all gone, now, and even the big ones in Milltown, east of Missoula, seemed to have closed. Too many tree huggers, I guess!
Lumber is a renewable resource, and the Germans have figured out the best way to harvest it and to prevent forest fires in the process. I did not see any clearcuts, so the mountains remain beautiful (except for the windmills), and the sawmills stay in operation. Trees are thinned, dead and dying trees are cut and removed and even fallen branches are collected. There is little left that would turn a spark into a raging forest fire. Fires are almost nonexistent in Germany!
Many Germans, at least those in the countryside, still used wood to heat their houses. Some of the farms had firewood stacked six to eight feet high, and the piles were twenty to thirty feet long. Even if they experienced the coldest winter on record, I doubted that they could burn that many cords of wood! At least the next ice age won’t catch them unprepared!
I thought all of Europe would be way ahead of the States in all this climate change nonsense. In the USA, extremists are working overtime to ban wood burning stoves and fireplaces, and Bill Gates is ready to spend millions of dollars to bury thousands of trees, instead of cutting them into lumber. It was refreshing to see that Germans, even the woke ones, still needed a warm, cozy, wood fire on cold winter mornings, and that lumber still has great value as a building material for the construction of houses and commercial buildings.
We stopped for lunch in the picturesque town of Triberg. The road climbed up the mountain and made a hairpin turn right in the middle of town. On both sides, businesses, restaurants, and churches, skirted with brick sidewalks, hugged the narrow strip of asphalt. The buildings were decked out in the finest of Alpine fashion, steep roofs with dormers, many of them three stories tall, white stucco walls, some with the classic wooden beams crisscrossing the white plaster. A white-water creek tumbled down the mountainside and raced through town on the other side of the road. This was the Germany I wanted to see!
We chose a restaurant that was situated up a cobbled walkway, alongside the rushing stream. We chose it because it was dog friendly. Heather takes Chewy on many of her short road trips. For some reason, Uncle Sam won’t let him copilot a C-130 J when she is in the pilot seat. He prefers to travel with her to being left at home. Because we had the dog, we were relegated to a small room up front, under the hotel, and not in the main dining room. We didn’t mind because we had the whole room to ourselves.
It was a beautiful old place with a wood paneled ceiling held up by dark hand-hewn beams. It was a place where I could imagine Beethoven, my favorite German composer, stopping for a drink, a meal, and maybe a night’s rest upstairs, had he ever traveled through the Black Forest. Who knows, maybe that was where he got his Fifth that everybody raves about! Sadly, I didn’t see a piano!
In Jackie’s and my first year of marriage we went to a church function and one of the ladies baked a Black Forest Chocolate Cake for dessert: rich deep chocolate, whipped cream and lots of cherries! I decided then that it would be my favorite cake for perpetuity. Sadly, I only got to eat it two more times in the 39 years since that first bite. It was impossible to get the right kind of cherries in Bolivia and whipped cream hated the hot, humid tropics even more than I did. Jackie made it for me one time when we were Stateside for Home Assignment. Then a few years ago, we stopped by Enid, Oklahoma to visit our daughter, Heather, who was stationed at Enid Air Force Base. It was my birthday week, and she baked one for the celebration and sent the leftovers, almost a whole cake with us. We kept it in the cooler and did our best to keep it from getting squished. We ate it as fast as we could and finally finished it off at a desolate picnic ground alongside the highway in eastern Montana, just shy of reaching Glacier National Park, our destination.
Though we were in a fancy German restaurant, to my disappointment, sauerkraut was not on the menu! Fermented cabbage was not my favorite dish, but I did grow up eating it and I just wanted to try the real thing! I make my own at home to restore my gut health. Otherwise, I can take it or leave it.
After we finished our scrumptious meals, the waiter came and asked if we wanted dessert. I was going to say no, but Heather said, “We are in the Black Forest, so you better try some authentic Black Forest Chocolate Cake!” I yielded to temptation even though I knew I was breaking my over two-year white sugar and gluten fast. I hoped it would be worth it!
We ordered two, one for JJ and Heather to share and a whole piece for me! If I was going to sin, and indulge in white sugar and wheat flour, I would sin big! To exacerbate my offence, authentic meant that the kitchen would drizzle cherry schnapps over the slice of cake before serving it. My Baptist soul was about to be vexed with fancy firewater! I ate every bite, but was disappointed. The cake was just okay. I could not really taste the alcohol, but without it the cake would have been very dry, indeed! The added liquid made it quite moist and easy to swallow. I think the one Heather made for me was better, even without the schnapps, but she told me that probably was because the Germans don’t use as much sugar in their recipe as we do.
I paid for our meal with my Sam’s credit card. Heather told us that it would be charged in Euros instead of dollars and there would be no exchange fees that way. That was good to hear! She also said, “Don’t try to tip the waiter. He would find that offensive!” I guessed restaurants over there paid their employees a decent wage. I chalked it up as another thing I wished the USA would learn from Germany. In the States, now, even fast-food joints are placing tip jars on the counter that beg for more money. Just pay the workers a decent wage and incorporate that cost into the price of the meal!
Heather wanted me to climb with her to a waterfall, just up the mountain from where we ate our lunch. JJ couldn’t make the climb and we asked if she could stay in the warmth of the restaurant. They graciously said yes, so we ordered her some hot chocolate to sip on while she waited for our return.
The climb was steep, and I felt rebellion against the exertion of climbing building in my bad knee, but I made it, not the worst for wear. The distance to the falls was not great, so I did not get super-winded as I had feared I would. The mountain air was nippy, and my ears felt closer to frostbite than they had for decades. That was unlikely, I knew, because the temperature hovered just above freezing, but forty years in the jungle and in Florida had crossed wired my internal therostate so that a little bit of cold chilled me to the bone! I was thankful that I had brought a warm coat along on this trip.
Like many towns in Europe, Triberg was setting up for their yearly Christmas market. It would be situated along the winding path we climbed to the falls. The booths were not on site, yet, but gayly colored wood cutouts were already in place on the mountainside.
Going downhill was harder on my knees than climbing upwards. I could see that living in Triberg, though it might prove delightful, would be hard on my joints; every place was up or down, with no level walking anywhere!
We still had time on our hands, so after collecting JJ from the restaurant, we entered the House of One Thousand Clocks. The store was full of Cuckoo clocks in all sizes, and priced from $300 to over $15,000. There were one-day clocks, eight-day clocks, and even some battery-powered clocks. Though I did not verify it, rumor had it that some cuckoo clocks in their inventory were made in China. That would be so wrong, akin to buying an Amish quilt that was made in Asia from an Amish shop in Pennsylvania. That was another practice I frowned upon! I would have liked to buy an eight-day clock, but those started at over $1000, and the fact that I seldom remember to pull the chains once a day on the clocks we have at home was no excuse to more extravagant spending.
It was night when we pulled into the Airbnb that Heather rented for two nights in the city of Konstanz, across the lake from Switzerland. Our dwelling was up on third floor. The building had an elevator, so JJ had no problem getting up to our room. She doesn’t do stairs well! Our accommodations had one bedroom with a bathroom. The kitchen, dining, and living room were open concept all together in one long room. There was an entry way just inside the front door, with a place to hang our coats. Heather gave us the bed, two single beds scooted together, and she slept on the couch in the living area.
FIN
More Over-The-Hill In Europe
Something Different
- https://fillburns.com/2022/09/20/rotten-to-the-core/
- https://fillburns.com/2020/05/23/stiff-necked-me/
- https://fillburns.com/2016/08/13/1433/
Writings By Phil 
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