Pictures from Germany

As you know, Agnes and I returned from our latest trip to Germany last Wednesday evening. It wasn't really a vacation trip per se, as the point was to settle Agnes's father's affairs; nevertheless, we did manage to do a little bit of sightseeing in and around the city of Singen. Here are a few pictures ...

My favorite place in Singen is the Stadtgarten, or City Garden ... a beautifully landscaped and peaceful area alongside the Aach River. There are a few sculptures dotted around the garden, one of which memorializes the German author Joseph Victor von Scheffel. He's the one on the right ...

Here are two more random pictures from the Stadtgarten ...

Agnes's cousin Bernadette and her husband Richard were a godsend to us during the visit, helping us with arrangements and (in poor Richard's case) allowing his car to be fully and completely packed with junk so we could take it to the landfill. One day they decided to take us on an outing to the Dorotheenhuette in the town of Wolfach, a glass-blowing center and gift shop in the Black Forest region.  

The Dorotheenhuette specializes in mouth-blown glassware, and for a modest amount of money (I think it was about 14 Euros), you can blow your own vase. Agnes, being the crafts-crazy person she is, naturally had to try her hand at it. Here, she heats up the slug of glass in the furnace under the watchful eye of the instructor ...

Once the glass was hot enough, she blew it out into the desired shape (this was not the end product, of course!) ...

This was Agnes's vase, as the instructor cut it away from the blowing pipe. The picture doesn't do it justice ... it was quite beautiful ...

On another day, our friends Vreni and Marcel drove up from Lucerne, Switzerland to have lunch with us in the Bodensee town of Radolfzell. We met them on our Panama Canal cruise a few years ago, and have remained friends ever since.

Richard and Bernadette also took us up the Schiener Berg - a ridge summit overlooking an arm of the Bodensee. It was a beautiful day, and the views were spectacular ...

I don't remember if I've written about this before in the blog (I know I have on Facebook), but Singen is the home of the Scheffelbruecke (the Scheffel Bridge, named for the same fellow whose statue you met earlier in this post). I first learned the story of the Scheffelbruecke from fellow blogger Buggie, who lived in the area some years ago. The bridge was built in 1923, during the depths of the wild hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic era, and the inflation was so huge and so rapid that the cost of the bridge went up - literally - every minute.

In the end, the bridge cost more than one and a half trillion Marks, as noted on this stone at one end of the span ... and it's often cited as the most expensive bridge in the world ...

On our last evening in Germany, we went to dinner with Bernadette and Richard at this marvelous restaurant in the town of Moos (pronounced mows as in grass, not moos as in cows) ...

As is probably fitting for a restaurant called "The Ship," the house specialties are fresh fish dishes from the Bodensee and the streams of the Black Forest and Hegau regions, and they were wonderful. I ordered warm smoked trout with horseradish sauce and parslied potatoes ...

... and, as you can see, it was pretty good! ...

I have lots of other pictures, but unfortunately I don't have any of the one thing I most wanted to photograph - the ruins of the Hohentwiel fortress that overlooks the city. I have dozens of pictures looking up at the Hohentwiel from Singen ...

... but it had been many years since we'd hiked up to the fortress itself. 

In order to keep me awake and force my body onto German time, on the day after I arrived, Agnes decided we should make the hike up to the ruins. This we did, and I took the camera along ... not realizing that the little Nikon camera I'd brought along did not have a memory card installed! We had made it about halfway up the giant volcanic plug on which the Hohentwiel sits when the camera flashed a petulant "out of (internal) memory" message ... AAARRRGGGHHH!!! It was a gorgeous day, the light was perfect, and I got exactly NO pictures out of a roughly 10-kilometer hike. Of course, the gift shop at the foot of the final trek to the fortress sold everything except photo supplies.

One interesting thing, though: the area is dotted with volcanic plugs (some, like Hohentwiel and Hohenkraehen, topped with ruined fortresses), but although the volcanos are gone, their memory lives on in the smell of brimstone all the way up to the summit. Ugh.

So, that's a brief summary in pictures of our trip. I didn't include pictures of the cleaning (you're welcome), but wanted to remind myself that we did, despite the circumstances, have a great time. After all, it's Germany ... how could you not have fun?

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo