Day 9: Waterfalls, Black Forest and Traffic Jams

As we headed north out of Lucerne on Saturday morning, we passed some larger farms, like this one.

Since we had been a punctual group all week, Reinhard decided to schedule a stop at the Rheinfall, a beautiful waterfall not too far out of Lucerne.

They were beautiful and it helped that it was another sunny, warm spring day. Can you see the boat taking people to the rock in the middle of the falls?

After our stop at the waterfalls, we headed into the Black Forest, which is densely populated with large trees situated on an older, not so tall as the Alps, mountain range. The trees were quite impressive, but this picture doesn't do them justice.

We stopped at a place that sells cuckoo clocks within the Black Forest and saw a demonstration on how they make the clocks.

Here are a couple of the hundred or so clocks they had on display (and for sale)...see the Harley Davidson one?

 Here the guide demonstrates the bellows that sit within the clock to make it say "cuckoo."

We, of course, had to have some lunch and since our days in Germany were numbered, we had a piece of Black Forest Cake and...

a beer (some of us did)...

Jerry goes into the last bite of his cake.

The place we stopped even had a life size cuckoo clock on one side of its building.

It was a great stop but unfortunately we experienced our next stop way too soon after leaving the Black Forest. We got caught up in a traffic jam on Germany's Autobahn (I think it was the A5). After two hours of going nowhere fast, we did make it to Heidelberg. Unfortunately we didn't have a lot of time there and settled for a quick (very quick) city tour on our way up to the castle at the top of the city.

I think the castle dated back to the 1300s with it being attacked in the 1600s by the French. It was never fully restored after that attack.

There was a US military ball taking place at the castle so it was great to see so many soldiers in their dress uniforms and their dates in lovely gowns.

Well, that's it for the posts from our adventures. After about 20 hours of travel, we did make it home to Indianapolis on Sunday evening. Hope you enjoyed the photos and words on this blog. It was fun.