Bob:

Our goal for the day was to do the "Permanter Wanderweg" near the Titisee in the middle of the Black Forest. The breakfast buffet was, by the way, enormous, with the usual meat, cheese, jam, rolls, yogurt, and cereal, but in addition to those we had both soft-boiled and scrambled eggs with ham, sliced tomatoes with cheese on top, chocolate covered pretzels, and other things I have by now forgotten. Such a tempting buffet always puts me at risk of over eating, so I tried to control my tendency to dive in and chow down, but that was quite difficult. It was nice to have both cereal and low fat yogurt available, though, so that I could mix them for a combination somewhat like we had for breakfast at Heinke and Gustl's home. Our hosts were very pleasant and gave us some bicycling road maps that turned out to be invaluable.

It was good that we had a filling and substantial breakfast, because as it turned out we didn't find a place to eat until almost three that afternoon. We started to drive to Waldau where our walk began, ran into a very long and very slow moving backup, made a U-turn and got onto some of the back roads indicated by the bicycling map to finally work our way north from Neustadt to Waldau. Waldau is more of a village than a town, so it was easy to find the Gasthaus Zur Traube on the far edge of it. We were fortunate to find the proprietors still at home that late because Wednesday was the "Ruhetag" or "rest day" for that hotel and they had basically closed up the place for the day. But the proprietress graciously took our money and gave us our start cards plus directions and a map. I was very happy to see the map as following only written directions in German is a chancy business at best for me.

However, the Titisee-Neustadt walking club that sponsored this permanent event had really done an excellent job because they also used small "W1" signs written on a white arrow to show us the correct direction to take at almost all the turning points. With directions plus map plus trail markings plus the biking map plus our GPS locator, even we couldn't manage to get lost!

The first section of the trail was a long, curving uphill trek that took us about 1/2 hour. When we reached the high ridge above Waldau the trail evened out, thank goodness, and we followed along a fairly level path in a huge circle around the surrounding valleys. This gave us wonderful views of the heart of the Black Forest region, which has some of the best scenery we have seen anywhere.

Monika:

Bob:

The forest itself offered an ever-changing combination of light and shadow. The tall fir trees sometimes did indeed look as dark and somber as the name Black Forest implies, but for most of our walk the trail was dappled by sunlight which transformed the forest into a far more cheerful place. We had some kind of wildflower blooming along the side of the trail in the more open areas, but I don't know what it was. At the edges of some clearings we also found a border of deciduous trees, and since this was October those trees were turning their beautiful golden fall colors and that was also a cheerful addition to the forest.

It became clear to me that the central Black Forest is not a monolithic blanket of tall evergreen trees but rather a patchwork quilt kind of forest with open spaces between large stands of trees. Sometimes those open spaces are pastures for dairy cows, horses and such. The bottoms of the valleys tended to be open places with houses clustered into very tiny villages of 5-10 houses or so, which made Waldau look like a big city!

After circling around the ridgetop for about 2/3 of a complete loop, we started to descend back into the valley at the Gasthaus Engel (Hotel Angel), which was one of our control points. We would have loved to have stopped for a meal there, but Wednesday was also their Ruhetag and it was closed. That was also the only place that we had any doubt about the trail because we had to go through two electrified fences, and I had never done that before. If you do this walk, be prepared to very carefully grasp the yellow plastic handle being careful not to touch any of the exposed high-voltage shock wire, hold the wire away from your body as you walk through the gap, and then carefully reconnect the wire so that the cows don't get out of the pasture! I would not, by the way, recommend doing this walk in the rain because water and high voltage electricity don't mix well and especially if you have a bum heart like mine you hate to put any unnecessary high voltage electric shocks through it.

Having navigated the electric fences, we followed the path downhill and across the road past a small bakery. I was dearly hoping for something to eat as by this time it was nearing 2 p.m., but the bakery was closed from 1 to 2 that day so we were once again out of luck. Still the trail offered very nice views of the valley as it curved around to return to Waldau and the Gasthaus where we had started.

Monika:

Bob:

Tired and a bit sore, we climbed back into the car and drove to the Titisee in the hopes of finding something to eat. Fortunately, on our way from the parking lot down to the lake we found several high-priced restaurants and one Imbiss that still had some overgrown hot dogs at a reasonable price. Munching those gave us a resurgence of energy and we continued walking (and shopping: Monika found another doll!) until we were on the shore of a roughly 1 kilometer in diameter lake.

The Titisee is backed right up against the mountains, however, and despite being small it is quite deep and the water is very clean. We took a 25-minute tour of the lake in a small electric boat, and the captain/guide said that the lake water was so clean it was even drinkable. The sun was still peeking out from between the clouds now and then, so we did manage to get some decent pictures of the lake and the small town that borders it on one side. We even saw the Feldberg peak that we had taken the cable car up the previous day.

By the time our boat tour was done we were also finished for the day. We drove back home, stopping off at Lidl for the groceries for the evening meal. It was good to get back to Pension Mattenhof, have dinner, put our feet up, and relax for the rest of the evening.

Monika: