Visit to Freiburg II

A new part of our traveling practice has become the exploration of a new city's parks. At the very least, Sophie needs a rest, and she often benefits by the chance to see other kids being kids, to run around, and to play. Sophie has always loved slides, but she also really likes the little "houses" many parks have. "I go in the house," she says. The Stadtgarten in Freiburg featured a slide with a little house on top of it!

Sophie went on a playground merry-go-round for the first time at this park, too:

After that, Mindy and Sophie tried out a giant swing:


And then, finally, Sophie fell asleep in her stroller. She slept long enough that we eventually had to wake her up.


After her nap, we took the funicular railway up the Schloßberg. From there you get quite a nice view of Freiburg and the surrounding area.

You get a sense for the height of the mountain from the tower of the cathedral in the photo below. The mountains you see close by are in Germany, but those you can make out quite faintly in the distance are across the Rhine in France. Freiburg is about due east of Colmar in France. The Schloßberg itself is part of the Black Forest (Schwarzwald), which is actually a wooded mountain range, not merely a forest as you might think from the name.

Here are Sophie and I with the Black Forest behind us:

As you can see, the city makes good use of its hills to grow grapes for wine. The city claims to produce the most wine from grapes within its city limits of any city in Germany. Okay, sounds fine to me.

And then we went back down to the Altstadt via the funicular.