Reflections of My Travel

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We decided to be daring and endure our first Zimmerfrei Frühstück. The buffet consisted of some mixed fruit, breads, odd spreads, a cereal, boiled eggs, lunch meats, cheeses, and the usual breakfast beverages. I took a big roll, some cereal with milk, a couple of the safer looking lunch meats/cheeses, a boiled egg, and both milk and orange juice to drink. The bread was delicious! The meats/cheeses were fine. The cereal was mostly good, it was a wheat flake cereal with dried strawberry slices, which was very good, but there were also some little soft pink things that frightened me and didn’t taste good so I tried to avoid them. The milk and orange juice were warm which, while we have gotten used to warm soda, was not very tasty. The boiled egg, which I just assumed to be a good old hard-boiled egg like I make back home, was actually a soft-boiled egg that ran all over the place when I cracked it and made me feel sick to smell it. All in all it was a fine and filling breakfast. Randal and I both helped ourselves to seconds on the bread because it was so yummy. As we continued on our northward trek through the Black Forest, we went over a mountain with snow flurries coming down on us in the 3°C weather. The next town we stopped in was Ulm – birthplace of Albert Einstein and home to the world’s tallest church steeple (528 feet). It was a nice little town to walk around. The Ulmer Münster (church with the record steeple) was absolutely gorgeous. The steeple work was so intricate that it looked like it was made of lace way up there. The doors were massive works of art. And the inside of the cathedral was just breathtaking. There was detail everywhere. Even the choir benches up beyond the alter were like statues. It was truly beautiful. And the choir singing in the back of the cathedral really set the mood. On the walk in the rain back to the car, we got lured by the sweet, sweet smells into a bakerie. Randal had an apple turnover thingie, I had a chocolate croissant which turned out to have amaretto in the chocolate. It was delicious. Just thinking of it is making my mouth water. We got back in the car and continued our drive up the Romantische Straße, turning at the end of it toward the upper part of the Rhine. We’ve set up camp just below Bingen.