A Place for Fish

 7/12

A day in Triberg.

Triberg is very cute. Its got a real town attached, but the downtown is very much driven by its old town and tourism. But unlike Hallstatt, I minded it much less here - it was also far less crowded. We started the day with a surprisingly nice ‘hotel’ breakfast and then headed out for a hike. The ‘hike’ to the waterfall is really not a hike, but once you get there, you can carry on and make it as long as you’d like, so that part is nice. You could easily spend a couple of days walking around in this area, plenty of forest to see and cute towns to visit. It really could be a whole vacation.

The waterfall here was heavily touted as one of the highest in Germany. But its only 163 meters, which - sure - is high. But considering it is over multiple sections the height itself was not impressive. It was nice however. Definitely not complaining. We spent a good part of the morning hiking around (with a playground interlude). As an aside, the Black Forest gets its name from the density of trees, making it dark as soon as you entered. Given that we were in more traveled areas, it wasn’t quite that way everywhere, however, I get it. These were easily some of the thickest woods I’ve ever seen. You can see where the fairy tales come from (Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood).

We finished off at the Schwarzwaldmuseum - which gave a basic history of the area and had a lot of the dress, industries and clock/mechanical music history of the area. For a euro here or there, you could get old player pianos with shows and such to play for you. Our hotel gave us a card that let us in for free, so it was easily worth it. After a slightly chaotic lunch due to a very stressed out waiter, we decided to use one of the other free entrances allowed by the pass we got from the hotel and headed to the public pool. In NYC, we have a lot of public pools - some of which are legitimately great, and others which are not. However, I imagine that a pool like this - orderly, with snack bars, nice showers and lockers, and a giant waterslide would be the natural evolution of city pools if white-flight had never happened. Nevertheless, it was a calm - and cool - way to end the afternoon.

And at the end of the long, though chill day, we were back in our camper trailer in the parking garage, which really was quite a fun way to have a hotel room.