Where's Bertie? He's still in the same car park as yesterday. It's a good location in this weather, as it becomes shaded from the sun at about 3pm.
Weather: Wall-to-wall sunshine and hot.
The valley in which we are sitting is flat bottomed, housing a small and meandering river, and bordered by limestone cliffs and outcrops, with plenty of woodland. Not dissimilar to the area around Beuron on the Danube, but on a much smaller scale.
There's an information point in the car park here, bearing a map showing a couple of walking route options in the area. One of those is advertised as being 6.8km long, the other 239km. We thought the former would be more appropriate for today, particularly as the board set out 11 points of interest that we could see on the way.
The highlight of the route was found sitting atop one of the limestone escarpments, and was advertised as a ruin, but when we reached it we found it to be a sturdy tower with a spiral staircase on the outside, allowing us to ascend to take in the view from the top:
It was only later, back down in the valley, that we found an information board that told us that the rebuilt tower was just one part of a 12th century set of fortified buildings.
Looking back up to the tower from the valley floor
The final part of the circuit, on the other side of the valley, was an unnecessarily indirect jaunt through the forest for no gain (I'm sure the riverside track would have been more interesting), other than seeing a vast field of wild sunflowers. We're seeing lots of these now, as the fields of wild flowers, that have been a common sight all trip, are now dying off, except for the sunflowers which are just putting on their display:
We returned to Bertie after 9km*, noting that most of the advertised points of interest were, to us, just nice surroundings, rather than specific things to ooh and aah at. (*The extra distance was because we opted to add on a visit to another ruin further up the valley. It turned out to be so ruinous that we would have missed the fact that we were standing inside of it, if it hadn't been for a tiny location plaque on a finger post.)
There has been little activity for the rest of the day, although when the car park started to get busy mid-afternoon (probably only a tenth of the number of cars here yesterday) we wandered up the road to sit on a shady bench, so that we weren't rudely taking up a parking space (and making the place look untidy) with our chairs.
This evening we've had a chat with our neighbour. When talking about Alsace (where he is headed) versus the Black Forest, he said the only difference between the two regions is that one speaks French and the other German. The surprising comment came when I said that I can speak some French, but not German - to which he said 'Me too!'. He only lives 60km along the road from here, and explained that they speak a Swabian dialect that is sufficiently removed from High and Flat German that there are great difficulties in understanding. That explains why so often over the last week one or other of us has said 'What language are they speaking?' about people nearby, before concluding 'I think it's German' on the basis that we couldn't identify it as belonging elsewhere. We now know that, in all likelihood, it was the Swabian dialect.
Mick gained a friend at teatime. Her groaking was in vain.
Weather: Wall-to-wall sunshine and hot.
The valley in which we are sitting is flat bottomed, housing a small and meandering river, and bordered by limestone cliffs and outcrops, with plenty of woodland. Not dissimilar to the area around Beuron on the Danube, but on a much smaller scale.
There's an information point in the car park here, bearing a map showing a couple of walking route options in the area. One of those is advertised as being 6.8km long, the other 239km. We thought the former would be more appropriate for today, particularly as the board set out 11 points of interest that we could see on the way.
The highlight of the route was found sitting atop one of the limestone escarpments, and was advertised as a ruin, but when we reached it we found it to be a sturdy tower with a spiral staircase on the outside, allowing us to ascend to take in the view from the top:
It was only later, back down in the valley, that we found an information board that told us that the rebuilt tower was just one part of a 12th century set of fortified buildings.
Looking back up to the tower from the valley floor
The final part of the circuit, on the other side of the valley, was an unnecessarily indirect jaunt through the forest for no gain (I'm sure the riverside track would have been more interesting), other than seeing a vast field of wild sunflowers. We're seeing lots of these now, as the fields of wild flowers, that have been a common sight all trip, are now dying off, except for the sunflowers which are just putting on their display:
We returned to Bertie after 9km*, noting that most of the advertised points of interest were, to us, just nice surroundings, rather than specific things to ooh and aah at. (*The extra distance was because we opted to add on a visit to another ruin further up the valley. It turned out to be so ruinous that we would have missed the fact that we were standing inside of it, if it hadn't been for a tiny location plaque on a finger post.)
There has been little activity for the rest of the day, although when the car park started to get busy mid-afternoon (probably only a tenth of the number of cars here yesterday) we wandered up the road to sit on a shady bench, so that we weren't rudely taking up a parking space (and making the place look untidy) with our chairs.
This evening we've had a chat with our neighbour. When talking about Alsace (where he is headed) versus the Black Forest, he said the only difference between the two regions is that one speaks French and the other German. The surprising comment came when I said that I can speak some French, but not German - to which he said 'Me too!'. He only lives 60km along the road from here, and explained that they speak a Swabian dialect that is sufficiently removed from High and Flat German that there are great difficulties in understanding. That explains why so often over the last week one or other of us has said 'What language are they speaking?' about people nearby, before concluding 'I think it's German' on the basis that we couldn't identify it as belonging elsewhere. We now know that, in all likelihood, it was the Swabian dialect.
Mick gained a friend at teatime. Her groaking was in vain.
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