What to expect
Black Forest
A very restless night in the van
I noticed how I slowly got tired when we watched a movie on the iPad which was definitely a good thing: the sooner I’d fall asleep, the sooner this night would be over (reminder: we are sleeping in the van in the Black Forest while it was snowing outside). However, this deep sleep wasn’t going to last long as some teenagers thought it would be a good idea to do donut rounds in their cars on the frozen car park on which we were sleeping! My first thought was: How dangerous and insensitive! And my second thought was: please don’t crash into us! I’m definitely getting older! After playing some more loud music and doing some more rounds on the car park, they finally left again, so back to sleep. The second time we woke up was due to massive snow flakes on the top of the van, so we were already getting a hint of what might await us in the next morning…
Big surprise the next morning
Waking up in the next morning and being happy first of all that we had survived the night, we quickly noticed that a lot around us had changed. First of all, we could see our own breath inside the van and everything inside was frozen, even the Black Forest eggnogg we had bought the evening before. So what would the outside world look like if the inside had already been frozen?! After we (aka Blake – thanks hun) had scraped down the inside (!) of our van (with one of my credit cards, didn’t think we’d need a scraper on a spring break trip), we looked outside: where a car park used to be the night before, was now only snow to see – and this in every direction!
Baden-Baden
Looking not so fancy in a very fancy town
We slowly drove off the snowy car park onto the main road that had already been cleared off – thank god we hadn’t stayed on one of the side roads! As beautiful as the Black Forest was, we had enough of it and went to Baden-Baden instead, the nearest bigger town. Baden-Baden is known for its hot spas and for it being rather fancy/ posh. Blake described it as the Paris of Germany because of its similar architecture. We, on the other hand, looked the opposite of fancy in our leggings/ jogging pants and multiple layers of clothing. Who could even guess we were backpackers?
We went into every store and bought different hot drinks and food – just to be inside.
It’s definitely a nice looking city and I’m sure it’s even nicer with better weather and with the spas being open again.
Sasbachwalden
Time for schnapps!
We drove further south again to do a Schnappsbrunnen-hike where you hike to different wells that the owners fill up with schnapps and you put money into a little money box next to the well. If we can’t warm up from the outside, we might at least warm up from the inside.
Online it said that all the Schnapps wells in and around Sasbachwalden would be empty due to covid. But we didn’t want to give up this easily and hoped we’d be lucky anyways (it had kind of worked with the “closed off” waterfalls a few days ago as well).
No luck with the first well
The 8.6 km long round trip was very scenic, going through a forest around a creek and passing lots of vineyards. After about 2.5 km we reached the first well – which happened to be empty. Oh well, at least it’s going to be a nice hike – in the snow, cold and with lots of wind… happy thoughts!
Finally a success!
The second well, that came shortly after the first, did have schnapps inside though and so did number 3,4 and 5! We were happy!
Returning to our van with both of our phones having died due to the cold and only relying on street signs was actually a miracle as both of our orientation skills suck! (Blake doesn’t want to admit this but his are actually even worse than mine.)
Freiburg
Spontaneous stop
We spontaneously decided to drive to Freiburg to stay the night there as we hadn’t had time for it before visiting my friends – the beauty of a road trip!
We got some hot Thai take-away food, found some parking in a residential area and had a great last night in the van.
Previous Day: Day 11: Stuttgart – Black Forest
Next Day: Day 13 & 14: Freiburg – Heidelberg – Frankfurt – Gelsenkirchen – Essen
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