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SW Germany and E France - Swabia & BF (Part 2 of 4)

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(Continued from … https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/trip-reports/sw-germany-and-e-france-part-1-of-4)

We left the rented bikes in Koblenz, trained to Mainz and picked up a car for the -ingens and the Black Forest.

Long travel day from Koblenz to Geislingen, but we had an interesting 4 hour interlude to walk around Mainz in search of our two main destinations, the Gutenberg Museum and St Stephen’s Church with its Marc Chagall windows. A friend suggested Mainz, which he loves. I found the city to be on the gritty side. The DOM was dark and forbidding. The Marketplatz outside it was nice enough, but somehow lacked the vibrancy that is common in others.

But the Gutenberg Museum, now in a temporary home in the Natural History Museum, was great. Manageable in size, with printing demonstrations on an old press, workshop areas for staff and certain visitors, history, other early books - both scribe-produced and printed - and one complete two volume Gutenberg Bible and another single volume. Nice!

The Chagall windows at St. Stephen’s Church brought light and hope to this Gothic church, so very different that the forbidding Cathedral down the hill. My wife teared up when we entered. The light and hope that these windows bring is truly uplifting. Try as we did to photograph it, we were on a fool’s errand there. We’ll just have to savor the memory, instead.

Onward! Tedious and challenging 3-1/2 hour drive to Geislingen, mostly on autobahns at speeds of zero, stopped dead in traffic, up to 140 kmh. (With the train from Koblenz to Mainz, getting to and from stations and car rental, a good 6+ hours of travel, though we were fortunately able to store bags at SIXT for our visit into Mainz before we actually rented the car.)

Geislingen is on just about nobody’s travel itinerary. It is a modest, former industrial town of the late 1800s, current population 27,000. And it is home to my wife’s Zoom buddy, a Ukrainian refugee and her two daughters. My wife’s friend had a large spread for us at dinner and the girls were certainly looking forward to the repast. Language barriers galore, but I think all had a good time. Certainly my wife and her buddy were enthralled to meet person-to-person after a year and a half of weekly, 1 hour zoom meets.

The next day, the three of us toured Geislingen’s charming old town, or Altstadt, its historical museum (open daily, from 3 pm to 5 pm) and a bit more. While much of the city grew up (and was built out) in the 19th and 20th centuries, there is a rather charming old town core with half-timbered buildings from the 17th century and earlier, including buildings as high as six stories. My wife and her friend were delighted to be in one another’s presence. I joined them some and wandered off some to take snapshots of the two of them and the town. Then we picked up her kids for dinner.

These three refugees have their feet in multiple cultures. Russian/Crimean (Sebastopol), Ukrainian, and German and the grandparents are now in Croatia. So it’s tough and the children, at ages 14 and 5, have challenges and “interesting times” ahead. My wife’s friend also has a musician sister who has been in New York for a decade, as well as a brother in Ukraine who is using his computer skills an 3D printers to build drones. What a world !

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Again, onward! To Tubingen, via the Mercedes Benz Museum in Stuttgart. The MB Museum is not just a car museum. It contextualizes the birth and growth of the auto industry with manufacturing and engine development from c. 1870 to modern times and with references, photos and texts about diverse topics from World War 1 to Josephine Baker, Charlie Chaplin, Ralph Nader & vehicle safety, and even Woodstock. You have art and design from the Bauhaus to Andy Warhol. It does not ignore Nazism, Auschwitz or WW2 and frankly, though briefly, acknowledges MB’s place in the development of Germany’s war machine and use of forced labor. More to current times, it shows how post-war industrial growth has benefited from immigrant labor, first from Italy and later from Türkiye. The weak area of the museum was the limited focus on climate and EVs. The greatest strength was hundreds of gleaming cars, buses and trucks from 1893 to the present.

Tubingen. Old Town. Very intact, beautiful, large, full of folks in their 20s (a university town), full of buildings from the 1500s or so and a castle that goes back 500 years before that. Very pretty old town on the flank of the hill below the castle. The castle is now home to the university’s anthropology museum, which has an interesting though more modest collection on display than its UNESCO world heritage designation might suggest. A nice, low-keyed visit to this bit of Baden-Wurtemberg and the Swabian Jura region.

From Tubingen we went to Burg Hohenzollern, a 19th century castle built by Prussian rulers, on ancestral grounds of one or another branch of the family. Older castles over the previous 900 years had been sacked and ruined or ruined by decay. Magnificent from afar on a mountain top, but less interesting on the inside unless you are a big fan of Kaisers Wilhelm I and Wilhelm II. I got sick as a dog after that, so my wife drove to Schenkenzell in the Black Forest and I crawled into bed. The next morning, she drove me to a clinic in Wolfach, but I was feeling better enough and the clinic look so very modest that we bagged that project. Glad we did. Our day brightened.

M drove us to the Black Forest Open Air Museum and we both quite enjoyed this sight. They brought houses from other BF locations from as early as 1599 to this site. Many are from the 17th C. and some are newer. They portray farm life and various works such as milling, animal husbandry, forestry, carpentry and tool making typical in the region in past centuries. The countryside is spectacular. Lush green pastures and beautiful forest.

We drove on to Triberg and parked just before you get to the Cuckoo Clock Capital. We lunched on a slice of schwartzwaldkirschetorte at a konditorei. We didn’t see the cuckoo clock district ‘til we continued our drive out of the lower town, so we just kept driving.

Next stop: Ravenna Gorge. Lovely, lovely hike up the gorge along the cascading stream and little waterfalls. Special added bonus: at the faux hotel village at the beginning and end point of our hike, there were scores of cuckoo clocks for sale and on display. Priced from €250 to €7000+

Freiburg. Met a south German couple at a bakery where we breakfasted on pastries and macchiato lattes. Turned out she was an exchange student years ago with a woman who lives on Bainbridge Island near Seattle, with whom she has maintained a close relationship through the years. We compared notes on Versailles and Loire Chateaux and Seattle and Vancouver. They love to travel in France, but were still somewhat unfamiliar with Germany’s Mosel. We talked of monuments to egos: Versailles and Burg Hohenzollern and they referred to our own in the USA

(Just one more continuation to wrap up our 2 weeks in SW Germany)

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We sorta took Rick’s 90 minute Freiburg walk … mostly in reverse … and didn’t take in nearly half the sights. Took well over 2 hours.

The Munstermarketplatz was jammed with vegetable & fruit stands, flower stands, carts with vegetable salads & olives, others with meats, one specializing in mushrooms and onions, and others with sausages&wursts on the grill. People were standing in the crowd with a wurst in one hand and a glass of white wine in the other, mostly German (and Italian) tourists and local shoppers.

We took our purchases back to our hotel for lunch, took our first mid-day rest in two weeks, and later resumed Rick’s walking tour. As RS notes, there are “stolperstein,” brass monuments among the cobblestones marking a family here, a couple there, deported to and/or killed in camps, including Auschwitz, 1940-42.

One final comment about Germany. It is a wonder to me how towns and cities are so compact. Towns and cities have hard edges. Beyond those edges, the land is farmed or forested, without the sprawl or ex-urban development that we have. And suburban houses are not on half acre or larger parcels. Stewardship of the land is plain - and beautiful - to see.

Yes, towns have plainly expanded. But township and urban compactness and definition is unmistakably a guiding principle.

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