The Black Forest, Germany

Black Forest
Bad Wildbad, Germany

It started in Seoul, Korea on a cold winter day in December. Michelle, while walking to the Vietnamese Embassy to secure our visas for an upcoming Christmas trip to Saigon, suffers a horrible ankle break by slipping on ice on the sidewalk. She winds up having nine pins/screws and a metal plate put into her ankle. We spend countless hours in the orthopedic department and become fast friends with several of the army medics who work there. That’s how I met Rich; an avid rock climber and thrill-seeking adventurer. As destiny would have it, Rich winds up retiring from the Army and moving to Stuttgart to work as a civilian at the base hospital.
Rich gives me a call last week and suggests taking off for the weekend. Michelle does a little research and suggests camping in the Black Forest. Rich and I are both totally down with the plan and load the gear into Rich’s Honda on Friday evening. We take all the back roads, missing the German traffic jams, and arrive at our destination a quick ninety minutes later.
We check in with the camp owners, getting the lay out of the premises. Camping in Europe is not camping in Montana or Idaho. You have to camp at designated campgrounds. A campsite for a tent, two adults and a car cost around $30 per night. It’s not cheap. As I reported in my Hallstatt, Austria Blog, campgrounds have showers, sinks, toilets, community kitchens, and are normally close to restaurants, pubs, bakeries, and other conveniences. As we enter the tenting area, the first observations we make are the size and quality of the tents. They are big expensive canvas houses staked out for a serious length of time…like weeks. These are the kind of tents one finds at the base camp in Nepal. Rich comments that he could run a medical clinic in the mountains in one of the tents. In European fashion, we greet everyone in the tenting area as we cart our gear on borrowed children’s wagons from the parking area. Almost everyone is from the Netherlands. We help each other set the tents up, and in a matter of minutes, are relaxing, cooking Bubba Burgers on the grill and drinking Bitburger Pils. We meet a few of our neighbors and find out they are in fact staying for several weeks. Almost everyone has young kids. To our right, we have a British couple with two children, ages 8 and 10. To our left, we have a Dutch couple who also have two children, ages 2 and 4. We are camped directly across from the swing set. It’s not exactly the camping paradise we had envisioned. Its camping heaven for European families and not so heavenly for two American guys who want to blow off steam by getting drunk, cooking hotdogs, and howling at the moon. We crash hard that night. When morning comes, we fix breakfast of Korean noodle soup, hot tea, bread, and cheese. Everyone at the campround, after fixing breakfast, take off to explore and sight-see. Rich and I hang out at camp, drinking beer, enjoying the stillness and fresh air. I stroll around the town and along the creek, loving every breath of mountain oxygen while Rich naps in the afternoon. Saturday night, the families come back just in time for a major cloud burst, complete with booming thunder and lightning. Rich and I hit a German restaurant for Hefeweizens and some great grub. I have a jagerschnitzel and Rich goes with a venison dish. We walk back in the drizzle, hang out for awhile until it’s really raining hard, and then hit the sleeping bags. I love sleeping in a tent in the rain, especially when it doesn’t leak!
Sunday morning arrives with a hot sunrise that dries the night’s moisture from our tents and gear. We decide we have had enough kids and families for the weekend, especially from the crying two year old next door, and pack camp up. We decide to hit a thermal bath for a nice soak and toxin-cleansing sauna before getting back to my place. A Greek restaurant in my small village of Mittelstadt is open on Sundays, so we chow down there on some soulvaki, gyros, french fries, and grilled lamb cutlet. Rich winds up calling in sick Sunday night and crashes at my house where we continue b.s.ing with Michelle until the wee hours of the morning.

Camping in the mountains of the German Black Forest
Mission Accomplished