Today’s plan is to ride the Black Forest Railroad through farmlands, valleys and little towns full of great architecture, green grass and whatever else we might see.

We’ve even seen fields of solar panels, then you’ll see a wind turbine, or several, next to a cluster of houses, always with a church steeple peeking through. Ruediger told us about a “million roof initiative” with the end result of many more than a million homes with solar panels providing their electricity. Don’t know the details yet of monetary incentives for purchasing themand they are not only on the larger homes, but also smaller houses. Seems like a no-brainer – why aren’t we doing this? We have more wind and sunshine than Germany so why aren’t we utilizing it?

Our main route is from Offenburg to Singen then the Bodensee – beautiful Black Forest homes/farms. For Ali and James, we saw an Aldi. Must be 30 tunnels. We’re taking 9 different trains from 9 am to just after midnight. Every one on time, smooth , quiet and scenic. Between the larger stations are farmlands and homes with colorful flowers. Met a nice woman who spoke broken English – visited the states once before as her aunt lives close to Seattle. We originally meant to get off the train in Singen, hang out an hour or two, get a bite to eat and head back for the 5 hour return trip. However, she said Sengen was not a pretty town (she was actually getting off there to visit her daughter). She told us to go to the next stop – 7 minutes further – and we could check out the Bogensee then head back – we’ll see how that works out.

The Bogensee was beautiful, definitely worth the stop – huge lake loaded with boats of all kinds, hills on the other side and a cool little town with great restaurants. But we’re a little off kilter with our train back so we’re hoping against hope that we make the midnight train to Zirndorf from Furth. We might be spending the night in a train station!

OK, update on train situation…we did miss the train and wound up in Stuttgart at 10:30 pm with no train to Nuremburg. So Plan B has us heading 2 hours to Munich and staying overnight. We planned on getting there at some point and looks like it’ll be tomorrow. Good thing I brought the contact lens cases and cleanser. Of course, didn’t bring anything else, not even a comb. We’ll look lovely tomorrow. At least the hotel gave us toothbrushes and toothpaste. We managed to get online and find a place a few steps from the main train station..decent review in TripAdvisor and reasonable. Got there around 12:45 and dragged our butts up to the tiniest room I’ve ever seen. But the bed was comfy and that’s all that mattered. Couldn’t leave the window open because of partying on the street below so got a little stuffy but we were too tired to mind. The hotel advertised free breakfast adn we weren’t expecting much but were wonderfully surprised at the selection of fruit, yoghurt, mueslix, pastries, juices, coffee and a whole buffet of bread and lunchmeat and cheeses. Turned out to be a good choice and they were so sweet accomodating us when they found out we had missed the train and didn’t have any overnight stuff.

Got back safe and sound…tomorow London bound.