Saturday June 8th

Today we went to Baden Baden, and we had a very scenic drive through the Black Forest.  When we parked and wandered around the town however, it didn't really grip us.  It would have been a great place to stop off and have some lunch but apart from that, I think it was more a town for going on a serious shopping trip for designer clothes.  Which we don't do.  I was wondering why the waiter assumed we would be "spending some money" when we told him where we were heading today!

We didn't spend that long in the town before returning to the car, but fortunately Mathew had consulted the map before hand and had spotted a couple of castles which we visited, after having bought some lunch from a bakery in the town.

Just outside Baden-Baden, was "Altes Schloss Hohenbaden" which was the first castle RUIN we had visited so far.  We were free to explore the place ourselves which was a refreshing change from the others which we had been to so far.  I have to say that this castle was pretty impressive with the number of levels there were to explore.  Just when we thought we had reached the top of a set of stairs, there were more in the corner leading elsewhere.  Needless to say, we got some pretty cool photos from up there!

Next, we went on to another one called Burg Alt-Eberstein, originally the residence of the Counts of Eberstein (in 1100), but became abandoned and the building material re-used elsewhere.  Again, this was a ruin, although we could only climb the tower, which we did. It was kind of undersandable though, as when we approached and left the place we could see the walls at the side were practically being held up by themselves. Not a good idea to have too many people roaming around in potentially structurally unstable areas..!  In the distance we saw a number of people hang-gliding and I tried to take a few photos - there must have been about 7 or 8 of them.  It was a good day to be out doing that I thought, as it was absolutely sweltering on the ground, and probably nice and breezy up there.  When we moved to the other side of the tower, the landscape was very flat but we figured out we could just about see the border of France.

After this, we drive back the scenic way and stopped of at what looked like a very touristy place called Mummelsee.  It was VERY touristy.  There was a random lake which was quite small and took us about 15 - 20 minutes to walk around, although it was quite fun as the path was rather higgledy-piggledy.  Se had a look in the shop as well which was HUGE but sold pretty much every since typical tack German souvenir you could think of.  One thing's for sure, they really like those mini bottles of alcohol, and there's plenty of jars of oil to choose from too!

After this, we made our way back to the hotel.  A fairly uneventful day really, but it was incredibly hot so it was probably a good thing that we didn't do too much today!