Category Archives: Baden-Baden

Vacationing in Germany: Part 6 – Driving Through the Black Forest to Baden-Baden

On our first full day after arriving in Stuttgart, we wanted to go to the black forest to look for a cuckoo clock. I found that Freiburg seemed to be the place to go for cuckoo clocks but my wife heard of many towns in the Black Forrest and thought we should look for one or two that were closer. I looked it up and found a list of towns that were closer. She remembered hearing about Baden-Baden and thought that would be a good place to visit.

The hotel gave us a card for the parking garage and we conveniently got into the elevator and took it to the basement where our car was parked nearby. It was so much easier than our last hotel in Munich.

Rose wanted to drive through the Black Forest and see the scenery so I set our British navigator to the scenic route which took us through the northern part of the Black Forest. It certainly was a great drive with some beautiful views. We would see beautiful scenery followed by a small town and then more scenery.

We did run into some problems, mostly from our navigation system which seemed to be plotting against us. It started by taking us off a main road, bringing us around in a big circle, and the putting us back on the road again. I thought we misunderstood her so we paid close attention and followed her instructions to the letter but ended up doing the same loop. It felt like a Star Trek episode and we were caught in a time loop. On the third loop I told Rose to ignore her and stay on the main road and the navigator seemed happy with that choice. At least she didn’t complain about it.

Another time she took us off a two Lane road and onto a road only wide enough for one car.

This road had some steep inclines and when it ended we had a choice to go left, down to the main road,  or right up to who knows where. The navigator said to turn right. Eventually we ended up on a road so narrow and steep it was foolish to go any further so Rose had to carefully back up to a place where we could turn around.

After that we were taken to a road that was closed. It was actually closed on one end but open so people could get out. Rose wanted to go through anyway but I figured it was closed for a good reason and said I would find a way around so I opened Google maps and guided her around a very long loop in the other direction. It connected to the road we needed to be on several miles ahead but when we got close to the connection point, that road was closed too. This time it was completely blocked off.  I then had to find us a way out of the mess we were in. Eventually we got fat enough away for the navigation system to change the route.

The other things that would happen is the navigator would suddenly stop talking and we would miss a turn. I would then have to fiddle with the controls or reset the map to get her talking again. I also tried to turn off the radio once because of bad reception but couldn’t figure out how to do that without also turning off the navigation. Finally she would sometimes tell us to turn were there were no roads, even though the map on the screen showed us continuing straight. If there was a road, we would turn on it and then be told to make a uturn back to the road we were just on.

Dispute all the navigation problems, the drive was very beautiful and well worth the trip. We are blessed with beautiful beaches where we live in Florida but there is nowhere in Florida that I know of that has countryside as beautiful as I have seen in Germany.

When we arrived in the town of Baden-Baden, I was reminded of a college town, and I learned there are several colleges in the area but I didn’t know that at the time.

We drove around but we couldn’t find a parking spot. After awhile we found an Italian restaurant we wanted to try so we drove down the side street next to it and up the next street before finding a spot to park.

We walked down to the restaurant which was also a hotel. The lady inside said the restaurant was closed and then added “It’s Wednesday,” like that was an obvious reason for closing a restaurant. After that we decided to go back to Stuttgart.

When we got back we made a reservation and then had dinner at our hotel’s Italian restaurant which was very good and more reasonably priced than the restaurant at our Munich hotel.

I will talk about our trip to Heidelberg on my next post. I hope you will join me.