A few days after leaving Dresden, we met up with our Virginia housemates AJ and 4-year-old Naomi. Naomi’s older sister, Francesca, is a veteran traveler. By age 5, she’d traveled with us in Vietnam, Italy, Mexico, Switzerland, and Colombia. But Naomi was born in 2020, during the height of the Covid pandemic, so she had fewer opportunities for overseas trips. AJ was eager to change that, so she and Naomi joined us to spend two weeks exploring the Black Forest and the Rhine River valley.
The Black Forest region in southwestern Germany is traditionally a place where German families go on driving vacations. The area is known for its scenic wooded mountains and lakes, picturesque old villages, traditional food (including Black Forest cake), and carved wooden cuckoo clocks.
If you’re not in too big a hurry—and how can you be with a preschooler—it’s possible to visit the Black Forest by public transit. For a small nightly surcharge, guests who stay at hotels and vacation apartments in the Black Forest receive a KONUS card that lets them ride for free on all transit in the region. Armed with our cards, we explored the area by train and bus, taking day trips from our three bases: Kirchzarten, near the city of Freiburg; the lakeside village of Schluchsee (where it rained too much for photos); and the beautiful little town of Gengenbach (our favorite). After that, we moved north to the middle Rhine region, where we took boat trips and visited castles from our base in the riverside town of Boppard.
While the adults loved the scenery, villages full of old half-timbered houses, local museums, roaring waterfalls, and a suspension bridge, Naomi (who doesn’t like heights) had other favorites:
- Ice cream—Seemingly every town and village had multiple cafes selling ice cream, which became our favorite way to bribe Naomi to be patient for just a little longer while the grown-ups looked at things she considered boring.
- Kaesespaetzle—Naomi is a picky eater at home. Macaroni and cheese is one of her favorite dishes, so we were relieved when she approved of the traditional German version (small flour and egg pasta in a cheesy sauce), minus the caramelized onions.
- Summer rodelbahns—These are hillside toboggan runs where you ride a heavy plastic sled down a curving metal track, with a hand brake to control your speed. Melissa and I first rode a rodelbahn many years ago in Switzerland, and since then, we’ve sought them out whenever we’re in hilly parts of Europe in the summer. Naomi rode in front of Melissa and kept yelling “faster, faster” the whole way down. We went to two rodelbahns in the Black Forest (in Gutach and at the Steinwasen amusement park). Naomi would have happily gone back to them every day.
- The Badeparadies waterpark—This giant indoor waterpark in Titisee has pools of various depths and temperatures, some with currents or bubbling jets, and an array of waterslides. Naomi especially loved the little-kid slides and a pool that makes big waves twice an hour. For adults, there’s also a nude sauna and swimming complex (which we didn’t visit this time) and a swim-up cocktail bar in the main indoor/outdoor palm house pool (which I enjoyed).
- Collecting fallen leaves and chestnuts on the walk back from Marksburg Castle—We went to the middle Rhine area because AJ was keen to see castles. Marksburg Castle in Braubach is one of the few hilltop castles along the Rhine that is largely intact in its medieval form. Naomi found some of the castle boring, and the spiral stone staircases were scary, but she loved collecting things on the woodland trail during the walk back down to the train station.
- Playgrounds, especially ones with sand to dig in—Every town we stayed in or visited had at least one playground, and many of them had sand underneath instead of mulch or rubbery surfaces. If the slides were too tall or the climbing structures too daunting, Naomi could happily spend hours playing in the sand.
- Anywhere with gravel to pick up and throw around—If there was nothing else to entertain her, Naomi made her own fun by picking up handfuls of whatever small rocks she could find and throwing them somewhere else.
Luckily, Naomi wasn’t the one taking pictures during her trip, so you can see all the beautiful things the grown-ups loved about the Black Forest and the middle Rhine region in our photo galleries.
