Another nice day dawned with blue skies/sun/cloud alternately, so we decided to do a treetop walk in Bad Wildbad, 20kms away, called the Baumwipfelpfad. I’d read about it & thought it would be a nice thing to do – it’s a fairly new thing in the Black Forest, and what a structure it is: 1km of high level timber walkway culminating in a 40m high spiral tower with great views over the forest.

We parked the car and started to walk the kilometre to the start of the treetop route, when we heard voices behind us....it was our English neighbours from the site, who had also decided to walk the treetops, but arrived by train! We joined forces and had a great day.


The walkway is set about 20m in the air and there are various info stations along the way, plus different ‘activity stations’ with obstacles to conquer, eg. wobbly steps, swing steps, balance ropes etc etc. R said they were for children...so of course I had to do them; Linda & I tried all the alternative routes while the men smirked/cringed from the sidelines. There was thick steel mesh to stop you falling, but I didn’t like the “nothing underneath” aspect at all. 

 

The tower was amazing: 40m high, also built of wood and looking like a twisted, tilted cup. It had very gentle slopes that led you up to the highest point & we could have seen right to the Alps on a clear day, but there was a bit of cloud & a general haze today. The view was actually rather uninspiring – just a solid mass of green trees, but the individual trees were very attractive, being a mixture of beech, spruce and fir.

 

There was a quick way down – mats in a metal tube-slide like the ones at the Sandcastle waterpark, but the top curves were far too steep for me to contemplate doing it. The bottom in 13 seconds? No thanks! Linda’s husband Ralph did though, & put the rest of us to shame, but we compensated by taking pictures of him. 

 








We all had lunch in the restaurant – a thick goulash soup which was fine, but the girl who served us needed a lesson in customer relations: she took ages to come to us, even when Ralph returned to the counter, served 2 of us only, was sullen and uncommunicative throughout and barely acknowledged us at all......she didn’t get a tip. We returned to the site by our separate methods, then had a chilled evening with books & wine :)