Trees and castles

The weekend was great. It being two days longer might have also contributed. Me and Maria rented a car and drove around to nice places. (Ok, so technically Maria rented the car and Maria drove around. I was just the map reader and hopefully also good company.) It is quite amazing how much there is to see just an hour or two hours trip from where I live. We saw the Schwarzwald (Black Forest) which was quite dark at places even though I do not really know where the name comes from. We also saw like at least ten castles in the Rhine valley north of here. We even had time to take tours of two of them. Quite nice I should say. If anyone is into castles like me then there are still like ten castles I haven't seen at all and almost ten I haven't been very close to. The people that built them had way too much money on their hands and apparently nothing better to do than build bigger castles than their neighbors.

One of the funnest things was when we went around this one little lake in the Schwarzwald in a pedal boat. The steering was impossible and at one time we thought we would never get it back to where we got it from. Eventually we did and got off safely on to the shore again. I had not been on a pedal boat in like at least ten years. It is doing little unexpected things like going on a pedal boat that make a vacation a vacation.

We also saw lots of other things but I'll have to save those for later (or never) and get going home to eat before my German class.