Schwarzwald Renchtalsteig Etappe 2 22/04/2015

Today I went hiking in the Scwartzwald. It was not a really sunny day so this made some people back of but we managed to be 8 people. The route we made was:

We meet at 7.45 a.m. in the Karlsruhe Hauptbahnhof and took the train to go to Oppenau.Oppenau is in a valley. The train keeps following the lower part of the valley. The rails togetehr with the german houses, created nice views.

In Oppenau we started walked till 1:00 pm when we stopped to eat something. At this point of the journey we had already done more than half of the altitude gain. Some of parts of the trail where quite step but it was worth the effort.

After the short brake we continued walking till Bad Peterstal-Griesbach. There we decided to keep walking till the next extation, 3.5 km away. That station was the last one of the rail.

Regarding the trip, we walked around 20km but I'm not able to the exact distance as I had some issues while recording the track and only some part of the journey got recorded.

Heidelberg 11/04/2015

Today I made a visit to Heilderberg to visit the ruins old the Heildelberg Schloss (castle).

This time I did the journey with my motorbike. It took around an hour of straight autobahn. I was able to park really close to the castle. Just before I parked I found a really curious traffic signal warning for the presence of frogs. I had never seen one of those so it deseverd a photo.

As soon as I started walking I had really nice views from the city. In the picture you can see an overview of the old-city. The big church is called Heiliggeistkirche (church of the Holy Spirit) and the bridge is called Älte Brücke (old bridge).

The entrance in the schloss costs 6€. You can see most of it from the outside but I think it's worth to get inside to take a look.  From the outside the towers are impressive. Some of them are in good condition and others are partly destroyed. Once you get inside it looks like a town-center. 

The original castle dates back from the 12th century. It was later expanded, destroyed and reconstructed several times. That's why we can see different types of buildings. 

Inside the castle there is the main square from which you can see al the buildings. Some of them look pretty well preserved and others are nearly ruins. The style of this buildings looks really different from the ones of the towers.