Blauen

A couple days before A and I left for Paris, one of the people training us how to run the b&b took three of us interns up to a mountain called Blauen.  (I think there's a town called Blauen as well although we didn't go there.) We drove up and up winding roads, passing tiny villages and acres and acres of thick forest.  At the top of Blauen was a hotel, "gasthaus" in German, a tower for TV and radio signals, and another smaller tower for people to climb.  Dozens of black flies buzzed around the gravel parking lot, attracted by what I don't know.  We walked to the side of the hotel, which sat right on the side of the mountaintop.  A concrete patio made a semicircle around the building.  As we approached the patio, it looked like the ground just dropped away beyond it and nothing but the hazy blue sky remained.  Then we reached the edge of the patio, and all at once the Black Forest filled in all the empty space.

We walked the circle of the patio, taking in the view.  T, the person who'd driven us, told us how the mountain we'd just driven up is part of the Westweg, the popular long-distance hiking trail that brings us a lot of our b&b guests.  "So if the hikers are exhausted, it's because they just hiked all the way up and down that mountain," T said.  This mountain, T said, was also a popular place for hang gliders to take off from.  We saw a couple, bright orange canopies floating against the backdrop.

We climbed up the tower, the one for people, not TV and radio signals.  Now we were above the hang gliders.  If the air hadn't been hazy, T said we could've seen the Alps in the distance.

There was a metal table at the top of the tower bearing a circular map of the Black Forest.  It had etchings for the major mountains and all the towns and even Basel over in Switzerland.

Being on top of Blauen was pretty cool.  It was that same "on top of the world" feeling that I got when I climbed monuments in Paris.  However, the view was very different, all greenery and no cities.  

After a while up there, we got back in the car and started to drive down the mountain.  We passed a lot of runners and bicyclists along the way.  I can't imagine going up the mountain on foot or on a bike.  T joked that these people had just parked cars fifty feet from the mountaintop and were just going up on foot or bike for show.  

We meandered along the winding roads, passing through more tiny towns and villages.  We stopped in one called Badenweiler.  Badenweiler is a popular vacation spot, I think, because it has a lot of natural hot springs and pools.  People go there to bathe for enjoyment and for health reasons.  The entire Black Forest area, actually, is well known for its spas, "bad" in German.  A small Saturday market was happening in Badenweiler, so we strolled through it for a few minutes.  On a ridge behind the Saturday market, the ruins of an old castle stood, going mostly unnoticed by everybody.  It's amazing what we get used to once we've seen it enough.