Atherton Family Notes

Yesterday morning, we got in the car and headed west of Unterkirnach.  We didn’t really have a plan for where to go, but we know that there were mountains in that direction.

About 20km out of town, we saw a road sign pointing to a village called Triberg.  I had seen an advertisement in Unterkirnach for a shop called “Haus Der 1000 Uhren” (House of a Thousand Clocks), so I thought we would go window shop at least.  Germany is pretty serious about stores being closed on Sunday, so we weren’t expecting to be able to do much more than that.

When we arrived in Triberg (down a very steep slope, I might add), we discovered that it was very definitely a tourist town.  As such, many of the shops were actually open, including the clock shop.  We decided to get out and look around despite the cold spell we continue to have here.  It was between 2 and 6 degrees here yesterday (that’s 36 and 43 in Fahrenheit).  It least it wasn’t raining (much).

The clock shop is really composed of about 5 buildings plus other shops run by the same group but carrying other souvenirs, and so forth.  As you can imagine, there are a lot of clocks to see.  This is definitely the place to go if you come to Europe and want to bring home a clock.

Of course, this clock shop exists because it is near the heart of the Black Forest, which is the place of origin of the cuckoo clock.  There are available in hundreds of different styles and movements, plus varying levels of animation.  Sandi found several that she liked, but an important decision like this clearly can’t be made in one day.  I’m sure there are many trips to Triberg in out future.

In addition to cuckoo clocks, the store also carries many other stypes, from tiny desk clocks to full size grandfather clocks, and many sty;es from traditional to ultra-modern.

The only item we actually bought in at the store was a sampler of three different local fruit wines.  There is one bottle each of blackberry, blueberry and cherry wine.  All of which are delicious as we found from the store samples.

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It turns out that the highest waterfalls in Germany are located in Triberg. So after we finished at the clock store, we trekked up the side of the waterfalls (170 meter or about 520 foot elevation). If we keep taking trips like this, we’ll definitely lose weight here– even with all the good breads!

The falls are a beautiful place. We got some good pictures of the girls with the falls in the background, which we will post as soon as we get a decent internet connection at home.

The falls are one of the more untouched areas in the Schwarzwald, except for the trails. Since the slope is so steep, no one ever tried to harvest the trees in the area. Because of this, the location serves as a de facto wilderness preserve.

The girls loved the trip. As a matter of fact, it was hard to keep Carissa moving since she kept stopping to stare at the cascades. Plus, there were lots of squirrels in the area that clearly have no fear of humans. The sell peanuts at a little stand near the falls, and people were feeding the squirrels right out of their hands.

Also, since we’ve had so much rain the last few days, there were lots of little waterfalls that had formed from the drainage. These were CeCe’s favorite parts, as they were small enough that she could get to them.

For lunch, we stopped at the little café at the bottom of the falls. We ordered some German foods, including something called Schnisselbrot, which is bread topped with some sort of creme and shredded dried ham (which has the texture of beef jerky). We also had a cheeseburger, which as best we could tell, appeared to be made with ground pork and was topped with mozerella cheese, curry ketchup, pickles and peppers (sehr gut — minus the peppers, at least). For dessert, we had some Schwarzwald chocolates, and Carissa had something that can only be described as a foot long Gummi snake.

All in all, it was a good trip, and probably makes our list of places to take visitors. Not bad for an unplanned trip!

UPDATE (with pics):

The lower cascade of Triberger Wasserfälle

Carissa and Celia at the Waterfall

The girls on the lower bridge; as seen from the upper bridge

One of the many friendly squirrels

A view of Triberg from near the falls

A sign on a local restaurant

A view in Triberg

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Since we are trying to learn to speak German, we spend a lot of time quizzing Carissa with “Do you know how to say ‘insert word here’ in German?” and then telling her how to say the word.

When we went to the old city in Villingen on Saturday, we bought pretzels (the big, soft German kind) from a bakery as we were leaving. When we arrived home, we gave one of the pretzels to Carissa. Carissa came up to Sandi and said, “Mommy, do you know how to say “pretzel” in German?”

“How?” said Sandi.

“Delicious!”

Update, May 2009:  It seems that this post attracts several hits a month from people actually trying to find out how to say “pretzel” in German.  The answer is “Breztel” and the plural is “Bretzeln”.  The German pronunciation is very close to the way you would pronounce those words in English.

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