After breakfast this morning we said goodbye to Horst and Klara and headed for Freiburg, loaded up with some goodies for lunch (and more) which we appreciated later in the day when we had a roadside picnic lunch. We had had a lovely couple of days getting to know Backnang and the area.
We had heard that the drive from Stuttgart to Freiburg was a very pretty one through the Black Forest and Horst had given us a route that would take advantage of it (using secondary roads rather than the autobahn).
Our first stop was at Herrenberg a very impressive town not too far from Stuttgart with houses in the half-timber style (many brightly painted) but somehow more ‘organic’ than those we had seen to date. Nothing seemed to be straight and we wondered whether that floors inside were actually level. There was a market happening in the Marktplatz (marketplace) and it was quite thriving. Also impressive is the "Herrenberger Rathaus" (town hall) and the town church, the "Stiftskirche”, its tower being the symbol of Herrenberg.
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| Herrenberg |
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| Herrenberg |
From there we drove through the Black Forest and the mountains to finish up near Furtwangen. It was interesting to see the change in architecture from the half-timber homes to the alpine château type homes you would expect to find in the mountains. Lots of pretty villages, dense forests, steep mountain roads and bubbling streams. We even found snow on the ground near Furtwangen. It got down to 5 degrees while we were driving through the mountains.
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| The Black Forest |
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| Snow near Furtwangen |
We arrived in Freiburg a little after 4pm to be met by Mascha. She is living in a two-bedroom flat with a uni-mate, Linn and has kindly given us her room with a double air mattress on the floor for the two nights while she bunks in with Linn.
We went for a walk along the creek near the flat but had to return when it started to rain. Across the road to buy a few things for breakfast and a bottle of wine for dinner then back to the flat for pumpkin soup – very nice it was too.
