Day 17 (Sunday) Germany

Gengenbach, Germany

After some research, we decided to only throw a few laundry items into the on-site service- enough to get through the flight home. It’s pretty expensive, but we won’t burn our precious time here at a laundromat. Sylvia took the bag down to the lobby and it should be ready after our trip to Europa Park on Monday.

Discovered the hotel has bee boxes on one of the roofs! (also seen below our parking lot)

Breakfast at the hotel was smaller, but good. They had pretzel bread that was the standout.

Cancelled the llama visit after the host asked if we could start an hour later because it was a warm day. Getting out there to not talk or take photos was not sounding great and already causing delay concerns.

Drove out toward the House of 1000 clocks and stopped at a Black Forest Costume Museum. It was actually pretty interesting.

After getting back on the road, we stopped along the way to look at a stork in a net on a church. No human babies could be seen.

Continuing on our drive, we passed through a few of the towns where the Bollenhut folk hat, which we saw on display in the costume museum, and for which the Black Forest Cake is modeled. We even saw on atop an old VW Bug…

Continued to the clock store, which was overwhelming, but fun. Bought some souvenirs here (passed on the ~$15,000 clocks they had on display) and walked around outside, where we saw a “if you pee here, we will record you and upload you to YouTube” warning sign.

Looked up a lunch place not far from our hotel (we didn’t realize how close- could have walked!) finding parking was a nightmare. The menu was taken away for a slimmer post-lunch one that didn’t seem as interesting. We were all a little hangrary, but all the food was great, even when our “mixed salad” arrived and included shrimp, salmon, chicken, and mashed potatoes. We all felt better. Sylvia discovered a bar/restaurant below the one we were in.

Walked around old town Gengenbach for a bit. Paid to climb an old defense tower (Sylvia had enough coins in her bag) and Vix and Sylvia each got a gelato cone (also with coins from the backpack).
Went back to the room and chilled for a while (I had a deep nap), then woke up to get dressed for dinner.

Back to the hotel, we discovered a few more interesting things about our hotel: a cigarette machine in the lobby, a crazy amount of weird space in our room, and a wooden fence blocking our balcony view of historic Gengenbach.

Dinner at Eatrenaline was incredible. Such a weird thing that, despite requesting an English tour, all the narration was in German. Food was stellar and the moving chairs and decor were fantastic. So many surreal moments. From the European dude with Wolverine hair playing our Asian chef to food emerging from a shelf in our chairs.