30th July – 8th Aug 2007

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I’m afraid The Blog has been neglected in favour of real-life contact and conversations with real people (Heather and Jono, Ade, Will and Grace). They spent 9 days with us in the fabulous Black Forest at a campsite in Titisee, in the midst of pine and fir trees. This is a stunning area to visit and we’d come back for more, possibly to the excellent Bankenhof camp site.

Things nearly didn’t work as we expected. A quiz question – in which country is Basel Euroairport? France, Germany, Switzerland? We learned the correct answer to be ‘in 2 countries’ - and we were waiting for our family at the wrong arrivals door! We had to wave across a welded mesh fence border running through the middle of the airport - us in France, they in Switzerland….

We spent glorious hot days by the lake, variously reading, boating, swimming, fishing and snoozing (guess my ‘activity’?). Titisee itself was a pretty village, albeit packed with souvenir shops and restaurants; they were picturesque and typical of the area, all in the best possible teutonic taste.


We visited lively Freiburg and wandered around its lovely medieval centre, with beautiful buildings and 12 inch wide street canals, originally used for putting out fires in timbered buildings – very well maintained and clean, but deadly if putting your foot wrong! We found the planetarium and parks, and were impressed with the efficiency of the trams (although not with the parking facilities).

Tempted by the free trains and buses for Black Forest visitors, R took us all off to visit a huge hi-tech waterwheel in Emmendingen (he plans to build a similar one in Sheffield). Ha! 1 bus, 3 trains and 5.5 hours later we arrived - wrong trains, wrong direction, wrong stops, wrong side of the road. Still, we did find a superb lake shore for our picnic. Ade and I should have known better, but the next day we trusted him to get us up a mountain by bus, so we could walk back down through the forest paths – ha again! This time we were 20 km away in the wrong place - Todtnau. Mind you, we did find the amazing Hasenhorn Roller Coaster and still managed a very pleasant, downhill, walk back to Titisee thought the forest

The next day we succumbed to the 2.9 km long roller coaster down a mountain, returning by ski lift. You control your own speed with skid brakes ...hmmm. After 3 goes, they all returned, wide-eyed, grinning and wanting more (and that was just Rick!). In fact you could get ‘zehn fahrts’ tickets, but that prospect simply had our younger family members in fits…….

It was lovely to have them all here and we really enjoyed it. They left in pouring rain this morning - it seems apt that the sun shone on the days when they were with us……..