The black forest

The black forest

Since Lotte is German, she seems to know lots of German people, one of them owned a cottage in the black forest, in a tiny little village called Rheintal Rheintal, nestled at the end of a very pretty valley, consisted of about 6 houses. The house we were staying in was originally built in the 1600s as the bake house for a monastery which has long since gone, but luckily the house remains.

From Rheintal, we set about exploring the surrounding countryside. We went and explored Freiburg, had a look around at Schloss Burgeln, a palace situated on a mountain nearby and explored it's grounds for a bit.

We went to the tops of a few mountains in the area and ate lots of wild blue berries on the way down from one of them.

We also went to France for a couple of day trips and checked out Colmar and Strasbourg, both of which were very pretty.

5 countries in 1 day

We decided that we were going to travel to 5 countries in one day and have a meal in each of them. So we did.

We had planned to hire a 3 series BMW or a C-class merc. Sixt in Heidelberg, the car rental place we were planning to use had even rung us the night before to tell us that if we went to Mannheim there would be one there for sure so we thought this was great. On arriving at Mannheim in the morning we discovered this was not the case and we had been 'upgraded' to a big 4wd, and we were also going to be charged extra for going to Mannheim to hire it and to drop it back to Heidelberg. After much discussion with the guy there we ended up with a B-class merc and we were off.

After having a light breakfast of pastries in Germany, we headed to France, where we found a patisserie and had some baked goods in some random small town that we have no idea what the name of was.

After France we headed to Luxembourg. We stopped at Luxembourg city, where we found a cafe and had lunch. Then headed to Belgium. We stopped at Malmody where we had crapes, ice cream and chips.

After belgium we headed into the Netherlands where we stopped for dinner at Maastricht.

We finished up by heading back to Germany to spend the night in Bonn.

Stuttgart

We decided that we would go on a day trip to Stuttgart to check put the Porsche and Mercedes Benz museums.

As you would guess, the Porsche museum was full of Porsches.



And the Mercedes Benz museum was full of mercs.

Heidelberg

On arrival in Germany and finding Lotte, the first thing we had to do once arriving in Germany was buy bread and have a big German breakfast.



Then once breakfast was over we headed out to find Jace, on finding him, we promptly went and had some beer.



Then we went sightseeing, over the next few days checked out the castle, old city, various churches among other things. During our sightseeing we discovered that blackberries grow on the side of the path and you can eat them!

And were off!

So long Australia, hello Germany (well in a day or so)

All ready to go

Were packed and all ready to go!