WEHR- suedlicher Schwarzwald 290 - 900 m. Erholungsort zwischen Hotzenwald und Dinkelberg am Augsgang, des nach Sueden offenen, romantischen Wehratales - mit Stausee. Sportflugplatz Huetten im Bild rechts oben.According to Moni, this town is on the southern edge of the Black Forest, very close to France and Switzerland. The picture looks like it was taken from a plane, but if I imagine being closer to the ground, it reminds me a bit of where I am living here in Bavaria. There's still a lot of open fields and trees around here as well. That's one thing I love about living here: the balance between towns and nature. Towns are clearly defined, and around them there's fields and trees and wildlife still. Not like so many places where everything's been built full to where you can't tell where one town ends and the next begins if it weren't for the city limit signs.
Wehr and Stuttgart are in the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, with Stuttgart being the capital of the state. Some other bigger and well-known cities are Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, Mannheim and Freiburg.
There is one lake in this state, Lake Constance or in German it's actually called the Bodensee. It was formed during the Ice Age by the Rhine Glacier. This lake is the connecting point between Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It was first mentioned by a Roman geographer around 43 AD. He saw that the Rhine flows through two lake and named them Lacus Venetus (Obersee, or upper lake) and Lacus Acronius (Untersee or lower lake). Later it was named Lacus Brigantinus for the Roman city of Brigantium, which is now known as Bregenz.
When I was about 18 (give or take a year or two, I don't remember exactly), my parents took me and my brother to this lake on one of our summer trips. I still think back on that trip with very fond memories (but to be honest I treasure all of my memories of our trips). We were staying on the German side, in a city named Lindau. It's actually a peninsula jutting out into the lake.
One of my favorites memories from that trip, is one night that me and my dad were walking along the lake, and I know he treasures that moment just as much as I do. It was just him and me that night, my mom and brother decided to stay behind as it was getting late and we were actually walking back to our hotel. My dad and I decided to go up the path along the lake just a short while and then turn back. At one point we looked out over the lake and were amazed by the way it looked. Neither one of us knows the exact circumstances that triggered it, be it the way the moonlight shone down on the water or something else, but the whole water surface looked like a shimmering rainbow, extremely pretty. We told my mom about it when we got back to where she was waiting and actually went back up that path a few nights while we were there, but we never saw those colors on the water again.
My second favorite memory of that trip was going to the town of Salem (no, not the witch hunt one, that one's in the U.S.). There's this park there (for lack of a better word) called Affenberg. It's a wooded area of about 20 acres, with only an outer fence spanning the perimeter. Nothing unusual, until you learn that there's about 200 monkeys (Barbary apes) who have free range of the terrain. No fences, no ditches and no cages. You can walk on a path through this woods and actually touch the animals. Or sit on a bench watching a small group of monkeys a little ways out, only to realize that one of their fellow monkeys decided to come sit next to you. At the entrance as you start your tour, you get a big handful of specially prepared popcorn that you can feed to the monkeys. It was definitely a highlight of out trip!!
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