Well the wi-fi on the ship was reeeaaallly slow. Just couldn’t get things to upload. Then once we were on land in Amsterdam, we were busy all day seeing the city and crashing in the evening. Now back in Brooklyn and will try to catch up (and hope my aging brain can reconstruct the stories based on the cruise itineraries and my photos).
We left Basel on the evening of the 20th and arived the next day in Breissach - our base for exploring the Black Forest and environs. Linda and Mel were brave enough to choose the E-bike trip through the forest (more on that later). The rest of us took a bus tour of the Black Forest. I was surprised that the Black Forest is largely mountainous (as our guide pointed out, the mountains are not as high as what we call mountains in the US, but we got up to about 3000 feet and the mountains are as high as 4800 ft). It's mostly a farming area - hard farming on rocky steep slopes. Not an easy life in the old days and still not much easier today. One needed to have a lot of kids to do all the work of raising cattle,sheep and pigs, growing potatoes and cabbage, and making the famous Black Forest ham. Nowadays, people often need to add some form of agro-tourism or similar to make it work. In centuries past, before global warming made winters less harsh, one way that people kept busy and productive was to carve wooden animals etc. and in some households/workshops, that also developed into production of cuckoo clocks (which actually originated there in Germany, not in Switzerland as is commonly believed).
Our bus trip took us to a pretty touristy site in the mountains (If you've ever been to Solvang, CA, you have a sense of it), but it was interesting despite the packaging for visitors. There was a talk about cuckoo clocks, a visit to a glass blowing workshop, and a demonstration on how to make the famous Black Forest Cake (with samples). I have to admit I skipped those so I don't have any photos, but maybe my companions will provide some I can add later.
Instead, I went on the "stroll" to a very old chapel nearby. The stroll turned out to have a pretty steep grade and some hair-raising steps with no bannister, but with my trusty walking sticks, I managed to survive and see St. Oswald's Chapel, consecrated in 1148 with gothic and baroque extensions added between then and 1719. The walk took us past a stream and an old railroad bridge that was destroyed during WWII in an attempt to slow transport of goods to German troops. It's since been restored and is functional again
Under the church was an ossuary - a collection of bones stored on sacred ground. Our guide explained that they had originally been buried in the church graveyard, but the ground eroded and shifted, necessitating removal of the bones to the space under the chapel.
After the hike, we piled into the bus to head back to the ship for lunch.
MEANWHILE:
Linda and Mel, the brave adventurers, were on an all-day E-bike trip through the Black Forest. Linda had some worries initially about whether she would be able to handle it, but they both came through it OK and were grateful for the boost the e-bikes give the rider - especially when going up hills. They passed through small towns, stopping for cake and coffee at one point and for lunch in a small restaurant. Their last stop was at a local pig farm where the farmer family talked about their life raising pigs and running a farm-to-table restaurant that's very popular with the locals.
It was a very cloudy and ominous-looking day, but the rain held off... Until the sky opened just at the last big climb. Both riders were drenched, but intact. Thankfully they were offered scnapps only after the biking was done (Mel said it tasted like a Yankee Candle; Linda had a teeny sip and decided no more). Then they were transported back to the ship by van. Both said it was one of their favorite days on the cruise.
One culinary factoid I found interesting was that the famous Black Forest Ham developed out of necessity. During the harsh winters, the livestock and the family lived in basically sealed up houses - all the smoke from cooking or heating filled the house. Hams were hung from the ceiling and over the winter months were smoked as a consequence of being in that sealed up house. Now of course, they do it in a more controlled way.