A hike in the Black Forest

Well, I am back from my vacation now and it was an activity filled whirlwind.

One of the LAST things we did was drive a bit down the road into the black forest for a little hike. The idea was that we would pick a reasonably easy route and then I would bring along the backpack carrier in case Liam got tired.

The area we went to was the town of Enzklösterle. It is a small town with mainly nature type things being the only attraction to bring people here. The route Claudia found was about 6.5km and did not have very much vertical change to it.

Of course as soon as Liam saw the backpack, he wanted to ride rather than walk. Since the options were letting him ride or spending an hour listening to him cry about it, here is how we embarked.We had a short walk through the village until we saw the sign indicating the "snail valley way" and turned off into the woods.
Claudia is seen here, in an action hiking photo
Liam is getting to be a fair bit bigger, and walking up the first hill was already starting to tire me out. All in all I carried the lazy man for 6 of the 6.5 km. I am not the most fit fellow in the world and I will tell anyone to give it a try, 6km with 30 pounds on your back is not an easy time... But I still gave the thumbs up sign.
In a rare moment of walking, here are Liam and Claudia high over the Schneckental.
Another reason to carry Liam is that a 1.5 hour hike can quickly become much much longer when you factor in just how often a 3-year old can be distracted by rocks, sticks, dirt, flowers, bird noises.... oh, and Liam insisted that he saw kangaroos and elephants on the walk. Who would have known that those animals were on the loose in southern Germany...
Anyway, we survived the walk and decided to have a fun stop on the way back. This town is also home to a "riesenbobbahn" which is like a giant summertime bobsled track thingy. It looked like fun and we stopped off there.

We bought tickets and then hopped on the lift, it pulls you backwards up the fairly large hill.
Here is a sled's eye view of Liam and Papa, take careful note of my hat head.
I made a video of the ride, it is about 2 min long. I was trying to speed it up to make it look REALLY fast, but my video editing software does not seem to be working...

And then here is the endWe finished first, then Claudia slid in right behind us.
Quite a nice day of action, not bad for a place that is just an hour up the road from our house. We discovered a few nearby fun places on this vacation period as you will see in upcoming posts.