Yet another glorious day to be thankful
Monday was one of those memorable days; both confusing and amazing. We left Camping Gaienhofen in Germany and drove into Switzerland to spend a couple of hours dawdling around Stein Am Rhein, a town full of beautifully painted buildings. When we strolled down to the edge of the lake, we realised how full the Bodensee and the Rhine River currently are. The water was lapping across the promenade and looked like it had recently been a lot higher. This part of Europe has had so much rain over the last few months and as we know, it is still coming down, quite a bit. It must have been awful living here through the floods but, selfishly for us, it turned into a bonus in the afternoon…..
When we left Stein Am Rhein we could have taken the road to Schaffhausen that stayed on the north side of the Rhine and this would have meant that we would have gone from Germany to Switzerland, to Germany, to Switzerland, to Germany, to Switzerland to get to our afternoon destination. But we decided to cross the Rhine at Hemishofen and stay in Switzerland. We were completely tangled up in borders, so many borders, there seems to be no sense in where the line wriggles around in this area; it certainly doesn’t follow the Rhine. In some sections, Switzerland owns both sides of the river and on other sections Germany has one side and Switzerland has the opposite bank. It’s all very confusing. Later in the day, we headed south from Dachsen to buy some GPL for Eileen, which did take us into Germany again, after which we crossed back into Switzerland and then back in to Germany. All day we kept forgetting which country we were in, but it didn’t really matter because the sun was shining and it was an absolutely perfect day to visit the Rhine Falls.
I really can’t do any justice to describe the formidable and impressive power of nature that we were staring at. Because of the excessive rain of late, it was flowing at close to one million litres per second which, looking at their records, is up there with some of the highest. It was fantastically, mesmerising to watch that enormous volume of water thundering below our feet.
We dawdled about here and there, constantly watching the powerful movement of water forcefully rushing past us and having to shout to hear each other over the noise of the mighty falls. There are numerous viewpoints, above, below, beside and at times it does feel dangerously close; you have to hope they designed and maintain those lookouts that are really, really close! We must have stayed there for at least two hours and every minute was enticing.
The Rhine Falls from the north side
As we drove north through Germany, we crossed vibrant green pastures set on undulating slopes, dotted with farms and small patches of woodland. We stopped for the night at the appropriately named Camping Rothaus in ….. Rothaus and looked through all our photos to relive what we had seen that day, another ‘Wow’ on this year’s trip.
We were now in the Schwarzwald, Black Forest, but it wasn’t really a black forest, more of a soggy, green and brown forest. There were no gateaux, amongst the pine trees and not a cherry in sight, just low drizzly clouds and damp cows laying down in wet fields. Tall purple lupins made a valiant attempt to add colour to a very grey drizzly day, but they couldn’t make the showery weather go away. For our picnic lunch we found a layby above a valley so green that even in the rain it seemed to glow like an emerald.
Leaving the Black Forest, we were effortlessly gliding along on smooth, signposted roads; it was quite discombobulating after what we’ve got used to in Italy. Ahh the efficiency of the Germans, you’re making Eileen happy, she really doesn’t miss those bande rumorose (rumble strips), the curse of campervans. We drove through the city of Freiburg Im Breisgau, which looked quite nice, but we were running a bit short on time and parking for a campervan was looking impossible. So, we continued west, crossed the Rhine yet again, and ended up in France. Well we think we’re in France, it looks like Germany; we’re in the Alsace.
great photos