Carleen's travel blog: Rhine Cruise Tag Vier

Another day of no photos. Grrr. I think the internet on the boat is just painfully slow and can’t handle the transfer of photos. Maybe when we get to a town with an Internet cafe, I’ll have better luck.
The day however was glorious! Sitting on the top deck of the boat now and it is about 75 degrees and sunny. Our day was spent in the Black Forest and it was just as beautiful as you can imagine. Rolling hills, pastures, quaint houses in cozy villages. We went to an outdoor museum where they have taken old farmhouses and restored them enough so you can get an idea of what life was like back in the day. Some were from the 1400s and 1500s. What was weird is that they did not have chimneys. The kitchens were very smoky and women died of lung cancer at a rate higher than men. Most of the house was unheated except for the parlor where there was a ceramic stove. There was a grist mill where the bran was separated from the wheat and was “puked out” of a carved face. (Photo to follow). The “traditional” costume of unmarried women includes a ridiculous looking black hat with large red pompoms on it.
Lunch was at a restaurant in a small town with schropfnudlen a kind of spatzel made from potato flour. Dean says his mother made them. Look for that on an upcoming Bensen menu. We then went to a cuckoo clock place where there is a giant clock with bigger than life sized figures in various tableaux. Inside are hundreds of cuckoo clocks for sale. A common theme is the wife beating her husband with a rolling pin. (Again photos to follow). There we feasted on Black Forest Cake and cherry wine. When I was in high school German, I had to describe Black Forest Cake to the class using only German. No one knew the word for cherry and I couldn’t draw one of the blackboard that looked liked anything. So in German, I said George Washington shneiden ein kirsch Baum. Frau Feinberg, that cake was for you!