Black Forest to France

We left the Bavarian Alps and drove west towards France, in the rain. We stopped at a German/Swiss cheese farm out of Fussen. They sold huge wheels of dry, holey cheese and we bought some nutty flavoured Swiss Emmenthal. It rained all night and some of us were not feeling well.


We kept driving out of Germany and stopped for lunch on lake Constance. We could see Switzerland on the other side and a huge gray Blimp up in the sky. We drove in camperstop in Donaueschingen where we walked to the spring full of sparkling coins. It is claimed to be the beginning of the Donau river which runs all the way south to the Black sea.

The next day we hiked the up and down the Watach gorge. The rain briefly stopped but the track was very muddy. Sometimes we walked right between the small river and the cliffs or otherwise we were in the trees. Every five minutes we’d break our ‘hiking sticks’ and find a new one on the ground. After two and a half hours we reached a log cabin, had Turkish bread, salami and cheese for lunch and then walked back to the camper. We had to wash our shoes in the river which was feezing.

The next day we drove through the black forest. We stopped at a little waterfall and the leaves were falling off the trees like snow. The views from the windy roads were spectacular. Most of the trees were green and orange but not black.

We could see France from a high hill and drove down to the border not passing any villages. We stopped a ‘Lidl’ supermarket before we crossed over the Rhine river into france and bought as much muesli, bagel crisps and bacon as we could carry. We also recycles all our plastic beer bottles in a special machine and the girls got lots of cardboard boxes to make things with.

Even though there in no border between the Schengen countries we knew we were back in france. We drove to a historic town. The gothic church looked creepy and bony, lit up purple at night. The next day Mum got up earlier than usual and went to the Wednesday mass in French. We climbed up the closest hill and saw ruins of a castle of another hill, smoking factories to our left and the town below. We took a shortcut through some grapes back down. We drove for the rest of the day and got some French bread and cheese at a supermarket. We drove through some very green farmland to a ‘France Passion’ goat’s cheese farm. Our hosts had sixty goats and made seven types different cheese. We watched them milk their goats, make their special cheese and feed the whey to the pigs. There were kittens everywhere and we played with their three grandchildren.