Americans and their Cuckoo Watches

The expiration of my Eurail pass is this Wednesday and I had two days of travel left, so Cameron and I decided to take a spontaneous day trip to the "Black Forest" this past Saturday to find cuckoo clocks. For those of you who don't know, the Black Forest region is in southern Germany and is where the first cuckoo clocks were made and is also where Black Forest cake is from. Its name is quite fitting because it's densely populated with huge, tall trees that shadow everything underneath.

We left early Saturday morning and headed to the tiny town of Triberg, right in the middle of the Black Forest. On one of the trains we met a German police officer who was a sergeant in the German counter terrorism special forces unit. He was really awesome to talk with and had told us about how at one of the many counter terrorism team competitions held in various places in the world, the team from San Antonio came to compete and were only successful in strength exercises, but were last in functional things like running, agility, and overall mobility.... go figure. When he heard of our plans to buy cuckoo clocks he exclaimed "what is up with all these foreigners and their damn cuckoo watches!?!?". It was pretty hilarious, but it made sense; cuckoo clocks are a typical German stereotype but only 1% of Germany has one.

Once we arrived in Triberg we made off to find the clock shop that my iPhone app was leading us to. We knew we needed to get to Nußbach, or so my phone told us, so when I asked a bus driver if his route took us there he said yes, we hopped on and paid the fare only to realize that not only did he not take us to Nußbach, but in the opposite direction. Upon realizing this, we checked the bus schedule to find out there was only 1 bus per hour on the weekends and we had missed it.

We then started our trek by foot to Nußbach. Following the directions given by my phone, we arrived 30 minutes later in the even smaller town. Finding a cuckoo clock shop, but not the famous one that we had intended to go to, we kept searching around, asking the locals. When one of the locals pointed us back into town, a few minutes later we heard a honk and turned around to see the guy that we had asked for directions from before, pull up and motion to hop in. I started thinking to myself, the pros and cons of having an injured knee. He ended up taking us all the way back into town and dropped us off at the clock shop we were originally looking for, not 30 meters from where the original bus had taken us. Quite the iPhone fail.

After clock shopping for a while, we decided to head back to another clock shop we had passed by, to check prices. We both ended up finding really nice quality clocks within our price range here, and even found some fellow Americans doing the same. Running out of time, we went back into town to see the famous Triberg waterfall and to grab a bite to eat.

Budgeting roughly 30 minutes to get back to the train station, we set off in the direction that we had thought we had originally come from, and boy… were we wrong. A kilometer out of town, we realized that something was wrong. We didn’t recognize any of the passing landmarks and we thought for sure that we would have passed the station by now. We continued walking and sped up the pace as the clock was ticking down, only to pass around another bend without the station in sight. I gave up… we were going to miss the train. We decided to just keep walking, that it must be further up when we came upon another small town where a local pointed us in just the opposite direction. This was about the time when it started raining on us.

Cold, wet, tired, and limping from the failed struggle to the misplaced bahnhof, we set off back to Triberg. After some hard thinking about the exact route the bus had taken, we finally realized that the train station was just 5 minutes north of the original starting point, in the opposite direction. Finally just happy to have found the train station, we sat and waited for the next train headed north where we would figure out our connections in the much larger town of Karlsruhe. We ended up arriving in Bonn around 1:30am, triumphant in our cuckoo clock conquest and ready to pass out. I have since purchased a cellular data plan to use for my iPad that may or may not prevent situations like this.